


Remington

by eromarap



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Blood, Comfort, Death, F/M, Original Character(s), Sarcasm, Universe Alterations, i ignore most major character deaths, lots of pain, rednecks, there's still pain, yes another daryl/oc
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2017-12-30 11:24:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eromarap/pseuds/eromarap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dead aren't the only thing giving her nightmares. The images plaguing her sleep aren't of the dead, but of the living, those that she couldn't save. Remington thought she was better on her own, she thought the apocalypse was something that could be faced without someone backing her up. She thought wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first walking dead fic, so it might be kinda sketchy. I already have most of this written, and I'm just editing it as i update chapters, so updates will be pretty quick. Let me know what you think!

Chapter 1: 

Remington Whitaker is at the edge of the woods, her belt around her legs to keep her firmly on the branch as she slept lightly. The noise of the bugs and the birds was something that she got used to, and they wouldn’t wake her anymore. The way they hadn’t for the past two months. At least that’s how long she thinks it had been—there’s no way of really knowing, she was too confused, and frantic the first few weeks, she hadn’t kept track of the days. Now it was impossible to know exactly how long it had been. 

But she figures somewhere around two months—two months since she had a real home, and a bed to sleep in, and things like food and water at her fingertips. Two months since she had last seen or spoken to anyone familiar. Family, friends, a distant acquaintance…anything—anyone. It had been two months since Remy felt safe, which is something that’s non-existent now—safety, that is, there was no longer a safe place to hide, a safe place to put your things down and relax. Safe didn’t exist; finding even somewhere that wasn’t fatally dangerous was extremely rare. 

Finding somewhere that wasn’t dangerous and had access to supplies was impossible. Anywhere near the city was risky, and even if a place was found that could be considered livable, supplies in the city were dwindling down to almost nothing. That’s why everyone that’s left alive is constantly forced to be on the move. Once looters came in, group after group, and took what they needed, there wasn’t much left for anyone else. So to stay alive, it was necessary to move onto a different place that wasn’t any safer than the last, just to try and get ahead of anyone else that might pop up and attempt to kill you for a stray can of vegetables. 

And all that just to repeat the process over again when there was nothing else to steal. Temporary home after temporary home, nothing was permanent. Not anymore. 

Remy jumps awake, the nightmare shaking her to the core. She wobbles on the branch and sticks the heels of her heavy boots into the branch to steady herself, she stays put, mostly because of the belt. She sighs, and looks into the sun directly above her head—noon. She had slept later than she thought, or had even meant to, but the nightmare always did the trick of waking her up. 

Remy reaches up and grabs her bag, bow, and arrows from the branch above her head. She reaches forward and pulls on the loose strings in her boots, tying them tightly. She pulls the backpack on her shoulders, puts the sheath of arrows over her neck, the strap under one arm so it stayed on her back, and secures the bow the same way, before she un-notches the belt around her legs and climbs down the tree. 

Remy slides her belt back through the loops of her jeans as she walks, sliding her backpack in front of her to dig through to the bottom, looking for a leftover protein bar, to no avail. She had run out of food, again. She sighs, and pulls out a water bottle, to find only enough water at the bottom for maybe one sip. One sip of warm water wasn’t going to do her any good in the afternoon Georgia sun, Remy puts the near empty bottle back in the bag and looks to her right, toward the city. 

 

Remy stops at the edge of the city, bow and arrows still securely attached to her body, shotgun slung on her back, pistol secured to her thigh. The moans of the dead meet her ears, as they wander aimlessly through the city streets. Remy takes alleys, and back roads to the center of the city where the noise gets louder. Remy knew by experience now that the empty alleys were the best way to go unnoticed by the geeks of the overrun city blocks. 

Remy jumps the fence into an alley, and jogs quietly down to the ladder she had found a few weeks ago, and was used to using now. She slows, and backs up around the corner again when she sees the man standing by the ladder, stumbling along. Maybe the alleys weren’t empty anymore… Remy takes out her knife and runs up behind the dead man, no noise coming from the worn out leather boots she wore. She stabs it in the back of the head, and it falls to the ground, dead for the second time. Remy conceals her knife again after wiping the blood on her jeans and climbs the ladder, entering the building through a window, where she can hear rummaging through the thin wall instantly. 

Remy crouches down and trades the knife for her bow, sliding it off her shoulder, and pulling an arrow from the quiver. She attaches the arrow and slowly moves forward, keeping the wood floors from creaking under her boots. Remy holds the bow in front of her and moves toward the doorway, not knowing what to expect on the other side, not knowing how many dead would face her when she turned the corner. The shuffling in the room suddenly falls silent. Remy stops walking for a moment, and stands at the edge of the doorway, listening for the corpse’s whereabouts in the room. She had never run into one of them inside the building, and it couldn’t have been a good sign that she was running into them now. She would have to change locations again.

She tightens her grip on the bow and turns the corner, holding it up and pulling the draw back at the same time. Remy comes face to face with a different arrow, tightly secured in a crossbow, tightly secured in the hands of a man who didn’t look like he was ready to eat her alive. 

Remy holds her arrow up to his face still, because sometimes, the living could be just as dangerous as the walking dead. Her hazel eyes lock onto his blue ones. “You gonna put that down, or are you gonna pull the trigger?” 

His eyes narrow. “Depends on what you do with that bow.” 

Remy looks at the three other men in the room. The four of them could easily overpower her, take her weapons, and leave her for dead. Or worse. One man in a police uniform catches her eye. “Hey, you that cop that rode in here on that horse yesterday?” 

He stares at her for a moment, taking in how put together and disheveled she looks at the same time. How there was a fire blazing in her eyes, that seemed tame enough to not do anything irrational—like shoot a living person who hadn’t made any move to hurt her. “Yeah.” 

Remy nods once. “I assumed you didn’t make it. Good for you. Though I don’t appreciate all those shots you let off.” 

An Asian man snaps out of a small daze, he couldn’t take his eyes off her for a moment. The moment that she swung around the corner, aiming that bow like it was the last thing in the world. He didn’t have to look far past the blood, sweat, and dirt to see how beautiful she was. And how beautifully tragic it was that he should meet a girl like her here. “You were here? In the city?” 

Remy moves her gaze to the other man. “How else would I ‘a saw him?”

He stutters for a moment. Remy recognizes the Asian man too. “You’re the one that’s always running in ‘n outta here, grabbing supplies?” 

He nods, swallowing a large lump in his throat. “How do you know?” 

Remy shrugs. “Been livin in the woods right outside—always see you runnin into the buildings. Takin my food.” 

He thinks for a second. “You’re the one that barricaded the alley, aren’t you?” 

“You’re welcome.” Remy mutters. She looks back to the man in front of her, her arm starting to ache from holding the drawl of her bow. She would ignore the pain if he decided to hold his crossbow up longer, because Remy would rather return the threat of death than just take it from someone else. “You gonna put that thing down or what?” 

He stares down the arrow she has aimed at him. “Ladies first.” 

She sighs, and drops her bow, letting the draw go slowly. When there’s no longer a crossbow aimed at her face she takes in a breath. “What are ya’ll doin in the middle of the city? You know there’s some dead people wanderin around outside that would jump at the chance to have you as a meal?”

“We could ask you the same thing.” the cop replies. 

Remy raises an eyebrow. “I asked you first.” 

“We’re lookin for my brother,” the one with the crossbow says, clearly losing his patience. Remy wants to laugh as the sentence begins its usual reiteration. Get back to the tree. Get back to the tree. “Seen him?” 

“I’ve seen a lot of people,” Remy replies vaguely. “Most of ‘em don’t make it very far.” 

“He would be hard to miss,” he says. “Missin a hand.” 

Remy raises an eyebrow at the statement. “How’d he lose a hand?” 

“Cut it off, handcuffed to the roof.” 

Remy scoffs. “So he’s the idiot that was screamin his head off yesterday? Drew in damn near every walker within a mile.”

“Nice of you to help him.” crossbow snaps. 

Remy rests her bored gaze on him. “I thought about it. Only thing I woulda done was get myself killed along with your brother, but obviously he didn’t need help if he’s willin to cut off his own hand.” 

Remy looks at the cop. “So I’m guessin’ you handcuffed him? Bein the cop and all?” 

He nods. 

“Why didn’t you let him out?” she inquires. 

“I dropped the key,” the other man speaks for the first time. 

“Why didn’t you pick it up?” Remy wonders plainly, and she sees crossbow roll his eyes, like he was wondering the same thing. 

“It fell in a drain. The walkers were comin’, I didn’t have a choice.” He says quietly. 

Remy nods. “Well, sorry to say if he’s stumbling around this city bleeding, and one armed—you probably ain’t gonna find much left of him.” 

“He cauterized the wound,” the crossbowed man speaks again. “So he ain’t bleedin much.” 

Remy raises both eyebrows now. “He did it himself?” 

Crossbow nods toward the stove on the other side of the room. Remy smirks. “Tough ass brother you got there. But that don’t make it any better. If he cauterized the wound the pain could have sent him into shock. Which would also kill him and result in his insides being spilled on the pavement. But good luck finding him.” 

Remy walks into the hallway, and slides the arrow back into the quiver, and slings the bow back onto her shoulder. She begins rummaging around in the boxes littered around the hallway as she hears whispering coming from the kitchen. 

“Hey!” 

She looks back at the Asian man who’s leading the other three, who are following after Remy. 

“Can I help you?” she asks, opening another box. 

“You got anywhere to stay?” he asks. 

She glances back at him, and picks up another box. “What’s it to you?” 

He looks back at the other three. The cop steps forward. “It’s just that I hate to leave you in the city alone. We have a camp set up not too far from here. It’s safe.” 

Remy stands up straight, and stares at the wall in front of her for a second, thinking. She looks over at the man that appears to be their leader. “Didn’t you leave crossbow’s brother here? Handcuffed to a roof no less?” 

“That was different.” 

She nods, and picks up another box. Still wary of the four men that were still much bigger than her, well, besides the lanky Asian, Remy decided it was best to test how skittish they were. “What makes you think I don’t have a camp not far from here?” 

“If you had camp set up around here, why would you bring all your stuff with you on a food run?” Asian man asks. 

She smirks, and throws an empty box behind her. Get back to the tree. “Good thinkin. I don’t have a good lie for that one.” 

“We have food and water, at camp.” the cop presses, watching as she searches through boxes and continues to come up empty handed. “I get it, you don’t trust us, and I know nothin I say is gonna make you believe that you can, but I was where you are just the other day. Rode in on the horse, remember?” 

Remy stops and looks at the four of them, looking at them all in the eyes for the first time. They all looked at her with sincerity—except for crossbow, but Remy got the feeling that sincere wasn’t a common trait displayed from him. The cop though, she could read him easily—still a leader, understanding—and she couldn’t not trust him. 

A groan came from behind Remy. She spun around as the walker rounded the corner and reached out toward her. She kicked it in the stomach, sending it backwards. Remy grabbed her knife from her belt and shoved the walker against the wall. She sent her knife through its eye, and twisted it, making sure to be thorough. 

She pulls the knife from its skull and lets the walker drop to the dirty floor. 

“And we could definitely use some of that too,” the cop nods toward the walker. 

“I appreciate the offer.” Remy declines, sliding the knife back into her belt. Get back to the tree. “It’s for your benefit that I don’t come back with you. I don’t exactly play well with others.” 

“Well Daryl doesn’t either, it’s no big deal!” The Asian man exclaims. Crossbow glares at him. 

Remy nods, giving him a slight smirk. “Good to know.” 

“Look, she don’t wanna come with us, can we go look for Merle now?” crossbow half demands. 

Remy scoffs, picking up a box of unopened protein bars. “I’d listen to him. Might wanna get outta here soon, though. They do most of their walkin at night. Kinda makes it harder to get away from ‘em.” 

Remy disappears into the room the walker came from and left the building through a window, and down a ladder. She put the box in her backpack, and went back to the end of the alley. Remy jumped the fence and ran back into the woods, shotgun in hand. 

 

 

“What’s to stop my people from unloading on you right here and now, and I take what’s mine?” 

Remy rolls her eyes and leans her back against the brick wall, the face off going on just on the other side. In the time it had taken her to get to Guillermo’s, the cops group had found it as well.

“You could do that—or not.” 

Remy doesn’t know what the cop had up his sleeve, but she was hoping it was something good. 

Guillermo calls out what appears to be a signal and Remy manages to see this time what the other side had to bring to the table. The Asian kid was on top of the building—his arms behind his back, two men holding him up. Remy rolls her eyes—having heard enough. 

She turns the corner and strolls forward. “Guillermo, you over-dramatic son of a bitch.” 

Everyone turns to Remy, and she nods once to the cop and crossbow. 

Guillermo wants to sigh at the sight of Remy. Now was not the time. 

Remy stops between the two groups, and looks up at the Asian kid, and then back to Miguel. She looks at Guillermo. “All of this for a kid with a pot leaf tattooed on his neck? Really?” 

“Hey! That’s my cousin puta!” 

Remy smirks at Felipe. “What did I tell you about calling me a bitch Felipe? You want another arrow to the foot? Trust me, this time I won’t do you any favors and miss the important veins.” 

“Girl, I cannot stress how much now is not the time for your bullshit.” Guillermo glances at her. “I’m in the middle of something.” 

Felipe glares at her and Remy looks to Guillermo. “Right, sorry to break up the party, but I think I’ll be cashing in that favor now.” 

Guillermo nods toward the building behind him. “Wait inside.” 

Remy looks around once more, and sees the last man from the mall on a roof across the small opening. She taps her bow against her thigh thoughtfully and then goes into the building, making sure to knock her shoulder into Felipe as she walks by. “Cabrone.” she mutters, earning a glare from Filipe. 

Remy walks through the dark entrance and slings her bow over her shoulder, sliding her light backpack off her shoulders. Remy drops it onto a table and pulls out the box of protein bars, leaving them for Guillermo’s group grudgingly. Remy needed them—but she needed something else even more. Something only Guillermo had. 

The three men return only moments later, and Remy whistles nonchalantly. 

Guillermo stops in front of her. “Whatchu want?” 

Remy looks over to him. “How’s your day going?” 

“Don’t play games with me right now Remy.” he demands. “We’re running out of drugs, okay? I can’t keep owing you ‘favors’. Tell me what you want and how much of it so I can get you out of here.” 

Remy smirks.

 

~~

Remy doesn’t know how long it is, but Felipe’s the first one to make an appearance, only because one of the men needed his medicine. The cop and crossbow and the man from the roof follow Guillermo in, along with his grandmother. Remy stands beside Glenn, and sees the cop eying him. 

“What the hell is this?” he demands. 

“Asthma attack, couldn’t get his breath all of a sudden.” Glenn informs them. 

“Thought you were gettin eaten by dogs man.” the dark skinned man snaps, and Remy can’t help but laugh. The four men look at her. 

“Guillermo gave you the old ‘picked em up at Satan’s yard sale’ speech didn’t he?” Remy turns and points to the three Chihuahuas laying in the dog bed a few feet away. 

The cop looks to Guillermo. “Can I have a word with you?” 

The cop and Guillermo move to the side and Remy slaps Glenn on the shoulder. “Right, well have fun.” 

Remy starts to walk away but Glenn grabs her arm to stop her. Remy spins around and glares down at Glenn’s hand on her wrist. He let’s go quickly and Remy meets his eyes when he apologizes. “Thank you.” he says quietly. 

“What’re you thankin her for?” crossbow demands. 

Glenn looks over. “She came here because Guillermo owed her a favor. She asked him to let me go instead.” 

Remy sighs lightly as she feels the eyes on her. Remy’s head pounds, but she ignores it as she walks out of the room, and across the terrace outside, and back through the garage to go back toward the city. She didn’t need to be thanked—she didn’t want to be thanked, and Remy didn’t want to be part of a group. She didn’t need people to take care of—people to care about, because Remy had been there before, and she didn’t ever need to be there again


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

I could really use a cigarette right now. 

Remy’s hair whipped against her face painfully, dripping in sweat as the sun continues to beat down on her already heat exhausted body. She looks back at the dead chasing after her. It started out as four of them, and then it grew to eight, and then ten, twelve… She didn’t know how many were there now. It seemed like the whole state of Georgia’s walkers were after her. "Welcome to the beautiful and sunny Georgia." she thinks bitterly. "Try our peaches, and try to not get attacked by a horde of the undead." 

Remy had to slow a bit to shoot one dead man in the head, using the last shell in her shotgun. She let the gun go and fall down against her thigh, still attached to her backpack by a strap she had made herself. She thought about making that strap, how her brother told her that it would be so much more convenient if she was ever running and needed to drop it. She’d still have the gun if she needed it later, but she had her hands free for whatever was being thrown at her, figuratively, or literally. 

Remy grabbed her pistol from her thigh, and looked back to shoot another right between the eyes and she pumped her legs harder, going on what she thought had to be the fourth mile. Remy could feel the energy start to fade from her muscles despite how much she was willing herself to keep going. The adrenaline would only take her so far, and she hadn’t had much water or food in the past two days, which meant that she was running on empty, and her fast approaching death was gaining on her. 

Remy fired another bullet at another walker, but she didn’t have enough bullets to take out all of them, something she knew from the beginning. There wasn’t enough ammo left in the state of Georgia to take out the horde stumbling along the wet grass. There was no way Remy would be able to use her bow, which bounced against her back with every step she took. She would have to get up in a tree, and even then—more walkers could find her, and she’d run out of arrows eventually. She’d have to sit up in the tree until they lost interest, or she starved. She would die before they gave up. 

Remy bent her knees, and ran down a hill, seeing a stream at the bottom of it. The walkers fumbled after her, some of them falling and making it to the bottom before she did. She had to use three more bullets to keep them out of biting distance. Remy pumped her legs again by the side of the stream, and the walkers rushed after her, desperate not to lose her trail, and none of the coordinated enough to not lose their footing in the slick mud and grass by the water. 

She let off another shot when a walker got too close behind her. Remy jumped to the other side of the stream, and the walkers pushed through the water after her. It slowed them down and Remy pushed her legs harder, putting even more distance between them. Remy aimed her pistol and pulled the trigger once more, taking out another walker. 

She jumped over again to the other side and slipped on the wet grass, almost falling down completely. She caught her balance and ran again, the walkers all right behind her. Remy came to another edge, looking down at the ground beneath her. It was steep, too steep, and Remy knew it, but the walkers were right behind her, and she didn’t have another way out. She had one, maybe two bullets left, and that wouldn’t get her anywhere. There was thick grass at the bottom, but the fall could kill her, and she planned on it happening that way entirely. Remy turned and used her last two bullets before she realizes she should have used one for herself. 

Remy took off her bow, and tossed it down before she took a look behind her, and jumped.

 

 

“She’s down here!” 

Remy only vaguely heard heavy footsteps approaching her. She felt an aching, burning, sharp pain in her shoulder, and another pulsing pain in her right leg. “Is she bit?” the voice sounds distant, like it’s at the other end of a tunnel and underwater at the same time. 

She felt someone lift her arms up, and move her hair away from her neck. “Nah, but she ain’t lookin too good. That was a high fall, and this arrow can’t be helpin any.” She can recognize the voice as crossbow’s from the building in Atlanta and his voice got clearer the more he spoke. 

“Why do you think she jumped?” another voice asked, Glenn.

“Cause she’s stupid, that’s why.” 

“Come on, let’s get her up. Careful, somethin might be broken.” A third voice directed—the cop. Remy feels her body leave the ground and she yells out in pain, her eyes opening as she’s carried back into the woods. Remy’s body is shocked awake, and her hand goes to her shoulder, her fingertips grazing over something sticking out of the flesh, and at first she thinks its bone, but she looks over to see half an arrow sticking through—the other half of the arrow still stuck in the other side of her back. Remy grips the arrow, readying to pull it through her skin. 

“Don’t pull it out,” a rough voice demands. “It’s just gonna make it bleed.” 

If Remy was in her right mind, she would tell crossbow that if the arrow was out of the wound, they could bind her shoulder to stop the bleeding, but instead, Remy lets go of the arrow and feels her head fall back, and the pain fade out. Get back to the tree. 

 

 

Remy’s eyes open. She was in a tent. She heard low voices. Her whole body hurt. 

That’s what her mind processed instantly. She sat up slowly, and rubbed her neck, trying to work out the soreness. Remy looks around the dark tent trying to take in everything she could. There was a light blanket over her fully dressed body, making her sweat in the humid Georgia heat. She threw the blanket off and saw her boots by the door, reaching forward with her left arm, and felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, to which she looks down and sees the bandage wrapping it up, blood seeping through to stain the once white gauze red. She sighs, and grabs the boots with her good arm and pulled them on, looking for her weapons and backpack as she tied them. Remy shook out the blanket, and looked under the lumpy pillow, but found nothing. 

Remy unzipped the door to the tent and took a step outside, feeling for the first time the pain in her knee. The voices grew a little louder and she stumbled as she put weight on her right leg. Hyper extended knee. She felt someone steady her, and place her back on her feet lightly. She looks back and saw Glenn behind her, smiling lightly. “Hi.” he greeted. 

She stood up, and took a shaky, limping step away from him. She looks at everyone else around the fire, who have plates in their hands, enjoying their dinner, but were now staring at her.

The cop stands up, now dressed in different clothes. He moves toward her. “How do you feel?” 

Remy looks around but doesn’t answer. She sees a bag of guns by the door of an RV, and spots her bow leaning up against it. 

“Oh, yeah, your stuff,” the cop says, following her gaze. “Amy, and Andrea washed your clothes, put them back in your bag.” he looks back at two blonde women by the fire, and they both wave slightly and smile. “Dale cleaned your guns for you.” she looks over at an older man with a white beard, wearing a fishing hat. He nods and smiles lightly. “My wife, Lori, cleaned you up. Dressed your wounds.” 

A brunette by the fire smiles at her, holding a small boy, who Remy assumes is her son, close to her. 

Remy looks around, a little overwhelmed. 

“Uh,” she clears her throat, and swallows hard, feeling completely dehydrated. 

Remy looks down at a water bottle that’s offered to her. She follows the arm to meet the Glenn’s eyes. She takes it and nods in thanks. She unscrews the top and starts to chug it. She takes a deep breath and looks at the cop again. “You mind tellin me what happened?” 

He chuckles. “You don’t remember?” 

Remy shakes her head, only to find that it sends a throbbing pain to her temples. Concussion. 

“We heard gunshots, thought we’d go check it out. Daryl said he saw you jump off a cliff ahead of some walkers, they were starting to jump after you, so we brought you back here. You messed up your knee pretty bad, managed to get an arrow in your shoulder, hit your head too. Other than that just bruises.” 

Remy smirks lightly. “Is that all?” she asks sarcastically. 

“I’m Rick Grimes,” the cop says, grinning at her. “You know Glenn.” he nods toward the man in question. “That’s T-Dog.” The dark skinned man from the building in the city. “Anyways, come on, get you somethin to eat.” 

Remy limps over to the fire and sits down on a log, stretching out her right leg to alleviate the pain in her knee. Andrea hands her a plate and T-dog drops a squirrel on it. Remy doesn’t waste a second pulling the meat off the bones, and biting into it. 

“So what’s your name?” Amy asks. 

Remy swallows the meat and looks up at her. They had done enough for her…the least she could do is tell them her name. “Remington.” 

“Remington?” Glenn asks. “Like the gun?” 

Remy nods. “Remington, cause of my father’s obsession with guns, but it’s Remy if you want me to like you.” 

A few of them chuckle and nod. 

“Well Remy, how is it you had practically the whole city chasin after you?” she looks back to see crossbow standing behind her. Daryl, according to everyone else. 

“I needed food. I ran out about two days ago. There was nothin left in those woods for me to hunt, all my traps kept comin up empty. I went into the city, and there was just nothin left, and a few walkers spotted me as I was leavin, and they just drew in the whole group. Followed me right into the woods.”

Remy continued eating, the gnawing hunger in her stomach subsiding. No one asked anymore questions, and Remy kept receiving food without asking for it, but she didn’t complain. She just mumbled a thank you and kept eating.

“So, Remy, why’d you stay so close to the city? Not a square inch of that place that ain’t filled with walkers.” Remy looks up—it’s Andrea who asks. 

“I lived in Atlanta my whole life; I guess after all this sh—” She glances at the small boy and girl. “—stuff started to happen, I wanted to stay close to somethin I knew. It was stupid, I guess, but I think it kept me sane. Kept me from thinkin I was just imaging everything. It was a city that I was walking through since I was a little girl—and now you can smell the rotting flesh a mile away.”

No one says anything else, and Remy thinks about her half truth. She was honest in saying why she stayed that close to Atlanta, she didn’t want to leave. Even when her neighbors were trying to rip her stomach open. She couldn’t tell them the other half—why she was waiting so impatiently day in and day out. Why she stayed in one specific tree marked with an x at the base. She wouldn’t—couldn’t. 

One by one the group said goodnight, and walked off to their tents. Remy stayed by the fire, and kept throwing small pieces of wood on it when it started to get dim, just so she wasn’t sitting in complete darkness. Remy heard the footsteps approaching before she saw anyone specifically, and Daryl falls back into a chair a moment later, and sips at his beer, which Remy wondered where he got, but decided even if she did ask, he probably wouldn’t tell her. 

Neither of them says anything for a while; they just sit by the fire, and Daryl thinks about the question he’s burning to ask. A question he didn’t know if he would ever get to ask after the first few hours, when they said she might not make it. He knew deep down that she would—he saw it in her eyes the second she held that bow up at him, she was a fighter. And if there was a hell, Remy had most certainly been to it. He didn’t know why he wanted to ask the question, or why he was just itching to hear her answer. He didn’t know why he cared. 

He didn’t know why, when he saw her throw herself off that edge, he ran like he never had. Maybe he hated to see someone with that much fight give up like that. That easily. He takes in a breath. “Why’d you jump of that cliff today?” 

Remy looks over at him, not hesitating at all with her answer. “What else was I supposed to do?” 

He shrugs, like he doesn’t really care, to which Remy thinks—he probably doesn’t. “Shoot ‘em. Fight ‘em. Something. You nearly got yourself killed.” 

“I would have been dead if I didn’t jump anyway.” Remy runs a hand through her dark brown hair. “I got to the edge and thought about how I’d rather die. By falling to the bottom, or getting eaten alive and turning into one of them. Can you really blame me for jumping?” 

He stares at her for a second, and then shrugs. “Whatever.” 

She chuckles, and he looks over at her again when she doesn’t say anything. “Somethin funny?” 

She smirks. “You find your brother?” she changes the subject. 

Daryl shakes his head. 

Remy feels sympathy almost instantly. She knew what it was like to lose someone you love—and she could see the pain in Daryl’s eyes. 

“I’m sorry.” she says honestly. 

He looks over at her. No one had told Daryl they were sorry about his brother. Mostly because he knew no one in the camp was—but someone he had met twice in his life, who knew nothing about him was the first to try and comfort him…Funny how that shit works, ain’t it? 

Daryl scoffs. “Wouldn’t be sayin that if you knew him.” 

Remy looks down at the fire, and shakes her head lightly. “He was your brother—don’t matter what he was like, he was family.” 

They’re quiet for a while before Daryl speaks again. “Why’d you ask Guillermo to let Glenn go?” 

Remy had hoped she’d never have to answer that question. She sighs. “Guillermo’s a good guy, takin care of all those people, but I’ve seen the things he’s had to do. I’ve seen him fight till his last breath to keep those people safe, and to keep all his supplies. I knew he would kill Glenn if he had to, and I know he felt like he did. Ya’ll are good people too, and Glenn didn’t deserve to die. I wasn’t about to sit around and watch it happen. Not when I could’ve stopped it.” 

Daryl’s silent. Remy yawns, stretches her knee and stands up, not putting any pressure on her right leg, and not waiting for a response from Daryl. “See you in the mornin.” 

She limps off to her tent, and unzips the door before she slides in, stretching out her leg all the way down to the other side of the tent. Remy sighs and feels the sleep settling back in, despite the fact she slept for most of the day. The exhaustion was still racking her body and the pain wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

She looks up at the night sky through the top of her tent and feels her eyes slowly closing, and the crackling of the fire dying. 

 

~

"I'm so sorry Remy." he takes a few steps back. She follows him. 

"You don't have to do this." she pleads. "We can both go." 

He shakes his head. "No. I can't let you do that Rem." 

"And I'm just supposed to just let you go out there alone!?" she cries. 

Jason nods. "Yeah, you are." 

He pulls her into another hug and pulls away too quickly. "I gotta go. Be careful." 

Jason starts running, out of the woods, and toward the city. Remy stares after him. "Jason!" 

And then Remy’s staring at a walker. It’s shuffling toward her slowly, and she calls Jason’s name lightly. It stares at her blankly, and Remy doesn’t make any move to kill it. The walker grabs Remy’s arm and bites into her wrist. 

 

~

Remy jumps awake, sending pains through her body, which makes her stay still until the shooting pains fade and turn into dull throbs. Remy sighs and runs a hand over her face, wiping the sweat onto her jeans before she sits up and pulls the laces on her boots tighter and ties them securely. She pulls herself up, working to not bend her right knee, or work her left shoulder. 

Remy exits the tent, and pulls her hair back with a rubber band from her wrist. The group by the fire looks back at her. A few of them waved, a few called good mornings. 

Glenn stands up, and walks toward her. "You want some breakfast?" 

Remy shakes her head. "I gotta get goin." 

"Get goin? Where to?" Rick asks. 

Remy shrugs, deciding to lie. "The woods have been fine." 

"You got chased out of the woods." Glenn tries to reason.

Remy sighs. The same sentence ran through her head. Get back to the tree. Get back to the tree. Get back to tree. It was practically an instinct now. "Look, like I said before, I appreciate this, and I’m not tryin to seem ungrateful for what you did for me. Ya'll saved my life, and I'm not gonna forget that, but I'm better on my own." 

"No one’s better on their own. Not with the walkers everywhere. And especially not this close to the city." Rick says. 

Remy stares at him for a second. "You're not gonna let me go, are you?" 

Rick shakes his head. "No, not really." 

Remy nods, knowing she could slip out later. "Then I guess I'll take some eggs." 

Remy limps by the two of them and she sees Glenn smile at Rick. She sits down on the same log as the night before and is handed a plate with a spoonful of scrambled eggs on them. 

Remy eats in silence, listening to the other small conversations of the group around her. There wasn’t much to talk about small talk wise anymore…they couldn’t talk about the TV show that was on the night before, or a new movie coming out. There wasn’t much privacy in the camp, so everybody knew how and what you were doing…and everyone knew the weather. 

Remy finishes her small plate and puts it with the others, who are doing their best to keep conversations rolling. Remy looks at Rick. "Where're my guns?" 

He nods toward the RV, and Remy stands up and moves toward it, feeling someone following behind her. She pulls the door open and walks up the small steps into the RV. 

Remy spots her guns on the small table, which she reaches quickly and grabs her backpack and slings one strap over her good shoulder. Remy grabs her pistol and attaches it to her thigh, and hangs her rifle from her backpack and grabs the strap on the shotgun, holding in by her side. She grabs her bow and quiver of arrows on her way out, feeling so much better now that they were in her hands.

She turns around and sees Glenn staring at her. "Where are you goin?" 

"Out." She replies. 

She limps out of the RV and wobbles down the stairs. Remy makes a short stop at her tent to throw the rifle, bow, arrows and the backpack in. She keeps her shotgun and her pistol, along with the knife in her belt. 

"Mind if I come?" Glenn asks, still shadowing her. 

She glances back at him. "Can you keep up?" 

He chuckles. "With a handicapped? Yeah, I can try." 

Remy nods lightly. 

"So is that a yes?" he presses. 

She glances at him again. "Yeah fine. But I don't want to hear any complaining." 

Glenn smiles and follows her into the woods silently. Remy cuts down on the limping, ignoring some of the pain from her knee, because the last thing she needed if she ran into a walker was a limp. Remy moves silently deeper into the woods, and hears the occasional crack of a fallen stick from behind her. 

“So why are you out here?” Glenn asks, trailing closely behind. 

“I’m makin sure it’s secure.” Remy replies quietly.

“Dale keeps watch every day,” Glenn tells her. “There’s no walkers around here, he’d seem them if there was.”

Remy glances back at him, sighing mentally. “I’m sure ya’ll keep this camp safe, but if I’m gonna stay here, I wanna take a look for myself, alright?” 

Glenn nods, and stays silent for another, what Remy counts, is a half an hour.

"Hey, we shouldn’t go this far." Glenn whispers. 

Remy doesn't look back. "You're the one that wanted to come with me." 

He sighs. "I didn't know you were going out to get yourself killed." 

"You'll be fine." Remy mutters. 

They walk only another few feet when Remy stops, hearing dragging footsteps ahead. She puts her hand back to stop Glenn. Remy crouches down in the bushes and watches the walker stumble by slowly. Remy hands Glenn her shotgun and pulls out her knife. 

"What are you doing?" He demands, whispering so lowly Remy barely hears him. 

She looks back at him. "You want it to find its way to camp?" 

Glenn stays silent. Remy stands up slowly, and the walker spots her, moving forward desperately. 

Remy moves through the bushes and moves forward slowly, and venomously. The walker advanced on her, reaching its arms out to grab her flesh, and Remy kicked it back with her bad leg, the amount of force she was capable of putting into the kick wasn’t enough to send it back far, so the walker was coming right back for her. Remy dodged grabbing hands, and pushed the walker back.

Remy swung her knife out with her good arm and the walker takes a deep cut to the eye, moving toward her half blind, which didn’t seem to help much. Remy kicks it again, and can barely put her foot on the ground this time without pain in her knee. Remy was starting to think she got herself in over her head when Glenn yells her name. 

"Remy!" Glenn yells, warning her. Remy hears a click and falls to the ground, dodging whatever was flying toward her. She looked at the arrow lodged in the forehead of the walker beside her. Remy looks over to see Daryl with his crossbow still raised. 

Remy gets up slowly, keeping her weight off her knee. "I had him." 

Daryl scoffs lightly, and nods. "Looked like your leg was givin you trouble." 

“Yeah well I keep favorin one leg and the other’s gonna get weak.” she mutters.

He wants to roll his eyes. “So you nearly get yourself killed cause you don’t want your leg gettin weak? Didn’t think you were that stupid.” 

Remy looks at the walker that's shuffling up behind Daryl. She grips her knife, flips it, and throws it. The blade skims past Daryl's face and lands in the eye of the walker, sending it to the ground. Daryl turns slightly, looks down at the walker and smirks. 

Remy raises an eyebrow. "You were saying?" 

Glenn comes out from the bushes for the first time since Remy left him. He looks at the two walkers. "I'm...gonna go back...to camp." 

Remy leans down and pulls the bolt from the walkers head. She walks over to Daryl, who takes her knife from the walker’s eye. She holds out the bolt and he takes it as she takes her knife. Remy looks back at Glenn, who's standing closely beside her. 

"You gonna be alright?" she asks him. 

He nods shakily, looking a little too pale to be healthy. Remy starts walking back through the woods, wiping the blood off her knife onto her jeans. Glenn catches up with Remy quickly and Remy hears Daryl trailing along behind. Glenn hands her shotgun back to her and she lets it hang at her side. Remy barely gives in to the pain, barely limping on her knee every few steps putting a little more pressure on it. 

"You keep strainin that knee it ain't ever gonna heal." Daryl calls, he smirks while she can’t see him. “You should favor the other leg.”

Remy scowls, and doesn't answer and after a few minutes, she grudgingly starts to limp again. Glenn glances over at her. 

"What'd you do before this?" he asks. 

"You mean before the world went even more to shit?" she clarifies. He nods. She doesn't answer for a second. "I was a psychiatrist for a while, but it wasn’t really for me. I was thinkin’ about medical school when all this happened.” 

"Really?" Glenn asked. “You’re kind of young, aren’t you?”

She glances at him, smirking. “Twenty five? How old am I supposed to be?” 

He shrugs. "I don't know. How do you know your way around a gun bein a head doctor?" 

Remy takes another pause, not knowing how much she wanted to tell him. "My parents." 

"Were they cops or something?" Glenn asks. 

"No," she replies, stepping over a fallen tree. "My father just liked guns, my mother just liked fightin’." 

"Is that how you learned?" Glenn pushes even farther. 

"No, she never taught me how to fight." she says, and decides that since he asked, he could have the truth. "Guess I just paid attention, and learned from watching it.”

Daryl didn’t like the way Remy said that…something about her voice was off, something about what she said didn’t feel right. They reach camp before he can say anything and Remy walks off toward her tent, leaving Glenn by the RV, and Daryl at his own tent. Remy puts the shotgun in her tent by her backpack and walks back to the RV, which Dale's standing on top of. Remy needed to get her mind off what she told Glenn, and what she was sure Daryl overheard. 

Remy climbs the ladder up to the top, Dale smiles. "Come to keep watch?"

She shrugs. "Figured I should do somethin’."

Dale smiles. “How do you like it here so far?” 

Remy shrugs. “Better than anything I’ve had for a while.” 

Dale nods. “The apocalypse does bring some bad luck.” 

“I meant before the apocalypse,” Remy says quietly, doing the complete opposite of what she climbed the RV for. Dale gives her an understanding glance, to her surprise, and doesn’t comment, and she wants to thank him for it.

“So you just sit up here all day?” Remy asks, changing the subject swiftly. 

Dale nods. “Can see far from up here, gives us an advantage if I see one coming our way. 

Dale picks up his binoculars, and puts them to his face, looking out into the woods, and over the hills. “Huh.” 

Remy looks over at him, and tries to follow the line of the binoculars, but whatever Dale’s looking at is too far away for her to see. “What?” 

Dale hands her the binoculars and points up, to the hill across the camp. Remy follows his finger and looks through the binoculars to see a man at the top of the hill, throwing a shovel over his back. “Is that Jim?” Remy had met him once, briefly that morning. 

“Yeah, it is.” Dale says distantly.

“What’s he diggin for?” Remy wonders aloud. 

She looks over at Dale, and he shrugs in reply. “Got me.” 

Remy sighs. “Maybe he just needs to blow off some steam…diggin’ holes to tire himself out or somethin’. Give him a little while.” Remy hands the binoculars back to him. “I’ll come back later. Keep an eye on him; make sure he doesn’t pass out.” 

Dale nods and looks through the binoculars again. 

 

 

“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Remy looks up quickly, her hand going to her pistol. Dale continues. “We may have a bit of a problem.” She looks up to the hill, and sees that Jim is still digging; it had to have been hours now, which Dale confirms. The last time she had gone up on top of the RV it had only been a half hour. She and Dale decided to give him some time…but hours of digging brought on some concerns. 

A few of the group left, going back into the city for supplies, is what Remy was told in a mutter from Shane. So if Jim losing his mind, or got violent…most of the brute strength of the group was gone.

 

The group reach the top of the hill and Jim doesn’t even look in their direction as they all approach him, concern etched into most of their faces, some completely black, and some show fear. They all stand there and watch him, no one making a move besides Shane, who stays a few feet in front of the group, closer to Jim. 

“Hey Jim,” Shane says softly. He sighs when he doesn’t get a response. “Jim, why don’t you just hold up, alright? Give us a second, please?”

Jim stops, and looks at Shane, clearly annoyed and clearly exhausted. “What do you want?” 

“We’re just a little concerned man, that’s all. Dale says you’ve been out here for hours.” Shane replies. 

“So?” he retorts. 

“So why you diggin?” Shane asks calmly, which Remy knows is the right way to go. She keeps her right hand free by her side, so it can grip her pistol if she needs it. 

Shane chuckles. “You headin to china?” 

“What does it matter? I’m not hurtin anyone,” Jim brushes off the group and continues digging. 

“Yeah except maybe yourself,” Dale cuts in, stepping up beside Shane. Dale didn’t show fear, he showed nothing but concern about the member of his group that clearly needed help. It’s more than most of the people standing around could say for themselves. “It’s a hundred degrees today. You can’t keep this up.” 

Jim scoffs. “Sure I can. Why not?” 

Lori steps forward. “Jim, they’re not gonna say it, so I will. You’re scaring people. You’re scaring my son, and Carol’s daughter.” 

Jim stands up again, breathing heavily, shovel still in hand. He glances at Carl and Sophia before speaking to Lori. “They got nothin to be scared of. I mean what the hell people, I’m out here by myself, why don’t ya’ll just go and leave me the hell alone.” 

Shane glances at Dale, seeming to have a silent conversation. Seeming to know what needed to be done. Shane steps toward Jim. “We think that you need to take a break, okay? Man, why don’t you go get yourself in the shade, some food. Tell you what, maybe in a little bit I’ll come out here, and I’ll help you myself.” 

Jim doesn’t answer, so Shane continues. “Jim? Just tell me what it’s about. Why don’t you just go ahead and give me that shovel?” 

Jim stands up, backing up apprehensively. “Or what?” 

Shane stares at him, laughing lightly. “There is no or what. I’m asking you, I’m coming to you and I’m asking you, so please, I don’t wanna have to take it from you.” 

“And if I don’t?” Jim asks. “Then what? You’re gonna beat my face in like Ed, aren’t ya? Ya’ll seen his face, huh? What’s left of it! See, now that’s what happens when someone crosses you.” 

Remy’s hand slid onto the top of her pistol when Jim’s eyes skimmed over the group and she saw just how much anger was shining in them. Remy had seen people like this before, and it didn’t end well for anyone involved. She didn’t want that to happen here, today. 

“That was different Jim,” Shane mutters. 

“You weren’t there,” Amy says. “Ed was out of control, he was hurting his wife.” 

“That is their marriage, that is not his!” Jim yells, pointing to Shane. “He is not judge and jury! Who voted you king boss, huh?” 

“I’m not here to argue with you, just give me the shovel—” Shane steps forward and reaches for the shovel, which Jim pulls out of his reach. “Just give me that damn—!” 

Jim pushes Shane back, and swings the shovel at him. Shane was used to sudden outbreaks of violence…being a cop for so long, and dealing with this group over the past few months, Shane was always ready for violence. He was always prepared to tackle someone to the ground…always waiting for the fight to breakout. Shane ducks, and tackles him to the ground. Shane pulls Jim’s arms around his back, which leads Jim into the tearful story of his family. How he watched them die, and how Shane had no right to force him to do anything.

“You got no right! You got no right!” 

 

 

Remy stares at Jim as he sits tied to the tree, talking to Dale and Shane just out of earshot. Shane pours water over Jim’s head to cool him down from the digging and overheating. After a moment of holding herself in her seat, Remy gets up and walks over to them. She wasn’t normally one to give in to her burning questions…as her father used to say, ‘curiosity killed the nosy as motherfucker’, but Remy had to know. 

“Jim? Do you know why you were digging?” Remy asks. “Can you say?” 

Jim looks up at her. “Had a reason. Don’t remember…somethin I dreamt, last night.” 

Jim looks over at Carl. “Your dad was in it, you were too. You were worried about him. Can’t remember the rest; you worried about your dad?” 

Remy can see it in Carl’s eyes. “They’re not back yet.” he replies. 

“We don’t need to talk about that,” Lori intervenes, rubbing Carl’s back. 

“Your dad’s a police officer, son, he helps people. Probably just came across some folks that needed help, that’s all. That man, he’s tough as nails. I don’t know him well, but I can see it in him, am I right?” Jim looks up at Shane, who nods. 

“Oh yeah.” 

Jim nods, and looks at Carl again. “There ain’t nothin that’s gonna stop him from gettin back here to you and your mom, I promise you that.” 

Remy walks away from them, and goes back to her tent, sliding inside and laying on her back to stare up at the sky. She sighs, and for a second thinks about getting her stuff and sneaking away from the group. Get back to the tree. Remy didn’t like crowds, and she didn’t react well to other people, mostly because she understood them so well. It was easy for Remy to understand the human mind, and that’s why she hated them. She knew how vile they were, how sadistic they could be, and how little most humans cared for other people. 

They weren’t much different from the walkers, really, and that’s why Remy stayed away from them, for the most part. Why she didn’t help Rick when he first went into the city—why she never approached Glenn when she saw him run in for supplies. Take away a human’s sense of safety—their peace of mind—they become animals. Attack who and what they have to, to survive. 

 

 

“Remy?” 

Remy jumps out of her thoughts, and looks out the window of her tent to see Glenn staring in. 

“Yeah?” she replies gruffly. 

“You’ve been staring up at nothing for about three hours.” he informs her. “Andrea and Amy caught a bunch of fish on the lake today, you hungry?” 

What a stupid question to ask during the apocalypse. 

She sits up slowly, going easy on the aches and pains. “I’m fine.” 

“You sure?” he asks. 

Remy nods. “Yeah.” 

Glenn walks away and Remy looks at her bow laying on the ground next to her backpack. Her shoulder still hurt—but she didn’t have a choice now. Remy could either push through the pain in her shoulder to find dinner, or she could go a night without eating. Remy knew better than to even think about it, because in the apocalypse…if there’s food in front of you—you eat it. Remy couldn’t afford to be weak…so she had to eat. Remy exits the tent, bow in hand, her arrows secured on her back. She walks around the back of her tent, and behind the RV, to avoid any conversation that might occur if someone spotted her walking away. Remy walks along the edge of the woods, and slips through the trees unnoticed by the group. 

Climbing is difficult with a leg that can’t bend and an arm that can’t hold any weight, but Remy gets up to a sturdy branch and leans her back against the trunk of the tree, and lets her right leg dangle off the branch. Remy slides the bow off her shoulder and pulls an arrow from the quiver, securing it in the bow. 

Remy waits—and does nothing but that. She doesn’t move, or breathe too heavily, or pull her leg up when her knee begins to ache. It was uncomfortable, and she wanted to scream after the first twenty minutes, but she finally spots a movement in a tree a few yards away, and holds her bow up, pulling the draw back. There are branches in her eye line, and leaves hanging in the way, but Remy aims perfectly

“What the hell you doin up there?” 

Remy doesn’t flinch at Daryl’s rough voice ringing through her ears. She just aims steadily. She lets the draw go and the arrow flies forward, flying through the branches and leaves, and landing in the eye of a squirrel. 

Remy looks down at Daryl. “Killin’ dinner.” 

Daryl walks over to the fallen squirrel and picks it up, pulling the arrow from its eye, trying to not look too impressed. Most of the women in the group couldn’t even hold a bow, let alone aim it, and kill something with a perfect shot. “You know they got tons of fish over there?” 

Remy nods. “I’m allergic.” 

She slings the bow over her shoulder and climbs down the tree, one legged. She takes the squirrel from Daryl. “At least I can eat it while it’s still warm.” 

She takes the arrow as well and slides into back into the quiver. 

“You don’t know how to cook it?” Daryl asks. 

“Gotta know how to skin it to cook it,” she replies. “I usually eat it raw.” 

Daryl takes the squirrel back, and smirks. “If you wanted me to teach you how to skin a squirrel, all you had to do was ask.” 

He walks toward his tent, and Remy rolls her eyes and follows after him. 

 

Remy throws the last bone into the fire, and wipes the grease on her hands onto her jeans. She couldn’t deny that squirrel was much better cooked. Remy hears footsteps approaching and her hand twitches toward her bow. It had gotten dark, and she couldn’t see into the woods as well as before, so she was on edge. If there was one thing Remy liked less than walkers, it was not being able to see them coming. To Remy's relief, Glenn walks into the light of the fire. 

“Daryl, have you seen Re—” Glenn spots Remy, and stops. “Oh, you weren’t in your tent, thought you got lost in the woods or something.” 

Remy gives him a small smile, trying her best to make it look real. “I’m right here.” 

He nods awkwardly. “Right.” 

Glenn walks back toward the camp with his head down and Remy sighs. Daryl glances over at her. “He followin you around like a lost puppy yet?” 

“Gettin there,” Remy replies.

It’s silent for a few minutes and almost identical to a day before, Daryl thinks about asking her a question he can’t get off his mind. He wonders again why he cares. Why anything that’s happened in Remy’s life is any of his concern. He doesn’t have an answer for himself. He opens his mouth to speak again. “Earlier, what you said about your mom, watching and learning? What’d you mean?”

Remy looks over at him, wondering why he cares—at all. From the things she picked up from him, he wasn’t the type to think about, or worry about, others problems. Loners tend to stay out of others’ way—and lives, for that matter. She shrugs. “She had a temper, and in her eyes I couldn’t do anything right.”

Daryl nods, but doesn’t say anything in return, and Remy glances over at him again, before locking her eyes back on the fire. 

When a scream rings through the air, Remy's on her feet in seconds, her arrows slung on her back, and her bow in front of her. She runs forward, readying an arrow while she does. She only sees Amy on the ground bleeding for a moment before she sees the other walkers crowding the camp. She shoots off her first arrow, and vaguely sees it land in a walker’s eye. 

Remy hears shots start to go off, and she moves in a blur, swiftly loading arrow after arrow and letting them fly forward at the walkers. 

“Get to the RV!” Shane yells. 

Remy doesn’t make a move toward it, instead she lets go of another arrow, and loads another in the same second, sending it into the eye of a walker beside her. Remy reaches back for another arrow and grabs at the air. “Shit.” She slings the bow onto her back and pulls out her knife. Remy abandons her limp and moves quickly toward a walker, shoving the knife in its eye. 

Remy feels a grip on her left shoulder, in the still fresh arrow wound. She grinds her teeth together with the pain, and spins around, stabbing the walker in the forehead. Remy swings her arm around when she feels someone behind her and she catches the walker in the temple, and has to yank on her knife when it gets stuck. The walker falls to the ground, and brings Remy with it, her hand still holding the knife in a death grip. 

Remy yanks on the knife again, but can’t pull it from the walker’s skull. Remy lets go of the knife and spins around, kicking the walker that’s now in front of her in the chest. It falls back and she stomps on its face, crushing it’s skull under her boot. Two walkers move toward Remy at the same time, and she blocks out everything else—all the gun shots, the yelling, screaming, crying, it’s all gone. All she sees are the walkers. 

Remy punches one in the face, sending it to the ground with the force of her fist, and she backhands the other, she kicks it in the knee, breaking its rotted leg, and moves toward the other, giving it the same treatment of crushing its skull. The second walker grabs her right knee, and it easily gives out, not able to withstand the weight, and added force. 

The walker crawls toward her and Remy kicks it in the face, which only deters it for a second, and it starts moving toward her again. Remy drags herself away, her knee not able to handle any more walking or limping. The walker grabs her arm and snaps its teeth, and Remy shoves her boot onto its shoulder, pushing it away again. Remy looks up to see another walker stumbling toward her and backs away, only for it to fall down next to her and bite at her arm. She punches the walker in the face and the other walker bites her ankle—but can’t get its teeth through the thick leather of her boot. 

Remy elbows the walker beside her and kicks the walker at her feet in the face again, she hears a crack and the walker goes limp. Remy yells out in pain when the walker still moving next to her grabs her shoulder. She puts her hand around its neck and holds it back as she tries to stand up, but the walker pushes forward and gets on top of her. Her hand slips on its neck and the walker gets dangerously close to her face, snapping its teeth and growling. 

Remy pushes the walker back barely an inch from her face and her mind races. Remy refused to die. She refused to let this be how it all ended. Remy had come too close to death recently, and she wouldn’t get there again. 

“Remy!” 

Remy’s head snaps to the left, where she sees Daryl throw something toward her and pull the trigger on his cross bow in the same second, taking out a walker that was walking up on Rick. The object lands heavily in the dirt next to Remy’s head, and she recognizes the black pistol Daryl kept in case of emergencies like this. Remy shoves the walker back, putting all her strength into her good arm to reach over and grab the gun, which allowed the walker to get closer to her face and snap it’s teeth. Remy pulls the walker up farther and shoves the gun under its chin, and doesn’t waste a second pulling the trigger. The walker goes limp and Remy pushes it off of her, laying for a moment to take a deep breath.

Remy stands up, and keeps most of her weight off her right leg as she leans against a tree, the five walkers that she’d been fighting laying in a small pile in front of her. Remy hears footsteps approaching on her left and is instantly on alert again. Remy stands straight, her hand gripping the gun tightly as she turns to see Daryl walking toward her. Remy relaxes and holds the gun out to him when he reaches her. 

“Thank you,” she breathes. 

He nods, and Remy watches as the last few walkers are shot, and killed—for good. 

She takes a step forward and has to limp as heavily as ever. Remy reaches down and grabs the handle of her knife, putting her boot on the walkers face as she pulls, and finally, she frees it, wiping the rotten blood on her jeans. Remy puts the knife in her belt and looks at the ground, seeing an endless stream of walkers that leads into the woods. Amy is on the ground, Andrea crying over her, trying to comfort her sister as she struggles to breath. 

Remy can’t do anything but watch, along with everyone else, as Amy dies. 

“I remember my dream now,” Jim says quietly. “Why I dug the holes.”


	3. Chapter 3

The drive is long, and tiring, and it almost feels like they’ll never get there when the cars in front of the truck come to a stop. Remy gets out of the truck carefully, looking around the street for walkers that were living up to their name. She goes into the back and grabs her bow and arrows, securing them on her body and loading one arrow onto the bow just in case she needed to use it sooner rather than later. Remy walks forward next to Daryl, and they meet with the rest of the group as they walk slowly through the sepulchral street, stepping over dead bodies swarmed with flies. 

“Stay close,” Rick calls quietly. 

“Stay quiet,” Shane adds. 

They move toward the large building in a strange formation, and the dead bodies on the sidewalk and grass all stay dead—for the time being. The stench of the rotting bodies hits hard, and Remy chokes down the spoiled air. Those that couldn’t stomach it cough as they run through the bodies, and walk around tanks, and pass dead soldiers on the street. 

They reach the building, and Remy started to feel the smallest twinge of hope—but she knew better. Remy knew that she shouldn’t let herself hope for anything, so she forces away the feeling and grips her bow as Rick and Shane approach the wide doors and attempt to pull the metal up, or open it automatically. “Nothing?” Rick asks. 

Shane slams his fist against the metal, and it echoes in the empty air. 

“There’s nobody here,” T-dog states. 

Rick turns to him. “Then why are these shutters down?” 

Remy moves forward, feeling her muscles tense, and the short lived hope fade away quickly. “Walkers!” 

Remy spins around, and Daryl shoots the walker with an arrow. He turns on Rick, moving forward quickly. “You led us into a graveyard.” 

“He made a call!” Shane defends his friend. 

“It was the wrong damn call!” Daryl growls. 

“Just shut up. You hear? Shut up. Shut up!” Shane orders, he turns back to Rick, and moves forward quickly. “Rick, this is a dead end.”

“Where are we gonna go?” Jacqui asks, worry etched into her face. Go back to the tree, that’s where you’ll go.

“Do you hear me? No blame.” Shane continues. 

“She's right.” Lori says. “We can't be here this close to the city after dark.”

Shane goes on. “Fort Benning, Rick…still an option.”

“On what?” Andrea challenges. “No food, no fuel. That's 100 miles.”

“125.” Glenn corrects quickly. “I checked the map.”

“Forget Fort Benning.” Lori says. “We need answers tonight, now.”

“We’ll think of something.” Rick speaks again. 

Shane tries to pull him away. “Come on, let's go. Let's get out of here. Let's go. Please.”

Rick’s eyes snap up to the security camera as he backs away, and Shane starts to bark out orders. “All right, everybody back to the cars. Let's go. Move.”

“The camera… it moved.” Rick moves forward again. 

“You imagined it.” Shane tells him blankly.

“It moved. It moved.” Rick assures himself. 

“Rick, its dead, man.” Shane insists. “It's an automated device. It's gears, okay? They're just winding down. Now come on.”

Rick still moves forward and Shane tries to pull him away. Shane tries to make Rick let go of the only hope he had. But what else was he supposed to do? What else was a man that stumbled into the role of leader supposed to do? He was supposed to have hope. 

“Man, just listen to me. Look around this place. It's dead, okay? It's dead. You need to let it go, Rick.” Shane pleads. 

Rick slams on the shutters. Lori moves forward. “Rick, there's nobody here!” 

“I know you're in there. I know you can hear me.” Rick yells at the camera. 

Shane tries to drag him away, now with the help of Lori. “Everybody get back to the cars now!” 

“Please, we're desperate. Please help us.” Rick moves frantically now, proving that he is, in fact, desperate. “We have women, children, no food, hardly any gas left.” 

“Rick. There's nobody here.” Lori says to him quietly. 

“We have nowhere else to go!” Rick pounds on the door. “Keep your eyes open. If you don't let us in, you're killing us! Please!” 

Shane drags him away. “Come on, buddy, let's go. Let's go.” 

Rick tries to pull himself forward again, but Shane keeps his grip on Rick firm. “Please help us. You're killing us! You're killing us! You're killing us!”

The group turns to walk away; Remy feeling like there was nothing else, nowhere else that they could possibly go that would ensure survival. She hears a grinding sound, and turns around to be blinded by light, coming from inside the building—where the metal door is now open. 

Everyone stands in shock for a moment before it sunk in that the door was open in front of them. Someone was inside the building—and they had opened the door to let them in. They weren’t going to die—not today at least. 

Walking into the CDC lobby, Remy holds her bow at the ready, still not sure about the safety of the building according to the sight of the outside. A man is standing across the brightly lit lobby, holding an automatic in his hands. Those with guns raise them; Remy draws her bow and aims it on the man’s head. 

“Anybody infected!?” he yells. 

“One of our group was,” Rick calls back. “He didn’t make it.” 

"Why are you here, and what do you want?" The man asks, unsure, as he moves forward. The guns are lowered. Remy eases the draw on the bow and holds it down in front of her. 

Rick glances back at the group. "A chance." he replies simply. 

"That's asking an awful lot these days." 

“I know.” Rick nods lightly. 

Remy stares at the man as he moves under a light, and feels just the slightest twinge of recognition. She recognized his face, and looked into his eyes and saw nothing but fear and desperation. He wanted the group to leave. For a reason she can't think of at the time being, she feels a strong need to shoot the man in the head with an arrow. 

The doctor looks around, into the faces of the survivors. "You all submit to a blood test. That's the price of admission." 

Rick nods once. "We can do that." 

"Grab your things, once this door closes it stays closed." He warns, dropping the gun to his side. 

Remy gets a bad feeling in her gut, not liking the sound of a door that would lock behind them. Get back to the tree.

A few members of the group leave the lobby and run back outside. Remy stares straight at the doctor, and he locks eyes with her. She sees surprise on his face, but he covers it quickly, and looks away from her, avoiding her gaze at all costs. Remy takes the arrow from the bow and slides it into the quiver on her back. She slings the bow over her shoulder, seeing the doctor let out a small breath of relief. Like he thought she was going to kill him.

The rest of the group arrives back in the lobby after only a few minutes and Daryl hands Remy her backpack. She thanks him quietly and stares up at the doctor as they start following after him. They follow him into an elevator, where he talks into an intercom. “Vi, seal the main entrance. Kill the power up here.”

Rick shakes his hand. “Rick Grimes.” 

“Dr. Edwin Jenner.” 

Remy feels likes his name hits her in the face—but she can’t remember why. Whether it’s because her body is still pumping adrenaline through her veins, or because she had recently suffered a blow to the head, or if it’s because over the past two months she was forgetting things about how life used to be. Like how it felt to have air conditioning coming out of a vent—like it was now. Or how it felt to have real hope for the first time in a long time; but she was remembering now. It's quiet and crowded as Jenner pushes the button for the basement. 

"Doctors always go around packin heat like that?" Daryl asks, eyeing the gun in the doctor’s hand. 

He looks back. "There were plenty left lying around. I familiarized myself. But you look harmless enough." 

He glances down at Carl. "Except for you. I’ll have to keep my eye on you." 

Carl smiles lightly at the joke. 

The elevator doors open and the group shuffles out and into a hallway. 

"Are we underground?" Carol asks. 

"You claustrophobic?" The doctor asks. 

"A little." She says meekly. 

"Try not to think about it." he replies. 

Remy follows behind the group silently, so silent that they could have forgotten she was there as they're lead into a large room. 

"Vi brings up the lights in the big room." 

The lights instantly turn on, shining down on a raised platform that held computers and desks. "Welcome to zone 5." 

The group looks around the unusually empty room. "Where is everybody?" Rick asks. "The other doctors, the staff." 

"I'm it." The doctor informs them. “It’s just me here.” 

"What about the person you were speaking with?" Lori asks. "Vi?" 

"Vi, say hello to our guests, tell them, welcome." 

A computerized voice rings through the room. "Hello guests. Welcome." 

“I’m all that’s left.” Jenner assures. “I’m sorry.” 

 

Andrea sits in the chair across from Jenner and he sticks a needle in her skin. "What's the point?" She asks. "If we were infected, we'd be running a fever." 

"Humor me." The doctor replies. 

He pulls the needle from her arm and Andrea stands up—and wobbles. Jacque moves forward and helps her. She looks down at the doctor. "She hasn't eaten in days. None of us have."

The doctor looks at Remy expectantly, but he still doesn’t meet her eyes, she notes. She drops her bag and bow, and limps forward. Jenner stares at the pistol at her thigh—the only weapon apart from a knife that she moves forward with. She sits in the chair, stretching out her knee and stares at him as he puts the tourniquet around her bicep and readies a needle. 

Remy barely feels the pinch. She opens her mouth. "Have we met before?" 

The doctor glances at her for just a second, not in her eyes. "I don't think so." 

"You look familiar." Remy replies, knowing she had met him before. Somewhere. 

He doesn't reply and he glances at Remy for just a second. She narrows her eyes. The doctor rushes her along, pulling the vile of blood from her arm. She stands up and limps away, feeling like the room was spinning. 

 

~  
“You know in Italy, children have a little bit of wine with dinner,” Dale smiles at Carl as he hands Lori a glass of wine. “And in France.” 

“Well when Carl is in Italy or France he can have some them,” Lori replies, covering Carl’s glass with her hand. 

Rick chuckles. “What’s it gonna hurt? C’mon.”

Lori smiles slowly, and moves her hand away from the glass. Dale pours wine into the glass and hands it to Carl, who takes it happily. Everyone around the table watches as he takes a sip. He swallows the wine and shakes his head. “Ew!” 

Everyone laughs, and Lori pours the wine from Carl’s glass into her own. “That’s my boy.” 

Shane smiles. “Stick to your soda pop there bud.” 

“Not you Glenn.” Daryl calls. 

Glenn looks up. “What?” 

“You’re drinkin little man; I wanna see how red your face can get.” Daryl smirks. 

Remy sees Rick look at Jenner, who’s sitting at the end of the table, not laughing in the least. Rick stands up, tapping his fork to his glass. “It seems to me we haven’t thanked our host properly.” 

“He is more than just our host,” T-dog holds up his glass. The whole group calls out agreements, and Remy stares at Jenner, ignoring her headache. She doesn’t hear anything around her as she stares at him, feeling her heartbeat pick up, her blood pumping faster. She chews on her lip, and downs the last of the liquid in her glass, which no longer has a taste. There’s something in Jenner's eyes that just wouldn’t stop gnawing at her. 

“Hello?” a voice drawls in Remy’s mind. She flinches when there’s a hand in her face. She looks up at Daryl, who’s staring at her with his eyebrows raised. 

“What?” she asks. 

The group laughs. Daryl holds up the whiskey bottle. “You want a refill?” 

She holds up her glass and he pours the alcohol in. Remy downs it in one sip and holds her glass up again. He laughs and pours her another shot. “Alright.”

“So when you gonna tell us what the hell happened here, doc?” Shane looks over at him, and the room falls silent. “All the other doctors that were supposed to be figurin’ out what happened, where are they?” 

“We’re celebrating Shane,” Rick sits down. “No need to do this now.” 

“Wait a second, this is why we’re here, right?” Shane retorts. “This was your move. We’re supposed to find all the answers, instead, we found him.” Shane laughs and hooks his thumb at Jenner. “We found one man, why?” 

“Well when things got bad, a lot of people just…left.” Jenner starts. “Went off to be with their families. And when things got worse, when the military got overrun…the rest bolted.” 

“Every last one?” Shane finds it funny. 

“No, many couldn’t face walking out the door,” Jenner says. “They opted out. There was a rash of suicides. That was a bad time.” 

“You didn’t leave,” Remy states. “Why?” 

“I just kept working,” he answers. “Hoping to do some good.” 

Glenn stands up, glancing at Shane. “Dude…you are such a buzz kill man.” 

Remy downs her whiskey again and slides the glass down on the table. 

 

“Most of the facility’s powered down, including housing, so you’ll have to make due here.” Jenner walks swiftly down the hall, the group following after. “The couches are comfortable, but there are cots in storage if you’d like.” 

“There’s a rec room down the hall that you kids might enjoy,” he leans down in front of Carl and Sophia. “Just don’t plug in the video games, okay?” 

Carl and Sophia nod, happily. Jenner stands up. “Same applies. If you shower, go easy on the hot water.” 

Remy’s eyes snap over at the sound of hot water. Jenner walks off, and Glenn turns toward the group from the front, in disbelief. “Hot water?”

T-dog laughs, clapping Glenn on the shoulder. “That’s what the man said.” 

Remy backs away from the group and enters the room beside her; she flips the light on and throws her stuff down by the couch. Remy hears water start running in the rooms next to hers and she smiles. She stands up and enters the bathroom, laughing when she looks at the shower. She turns the knobs and puts her hands under the water, feeling them warm instantly. 

It was easy to take those things for granted when there was no chance that they would go anywhere. Never did Remy think that one day it would be a miracle to feel hot water on her skin, or to have clean clothes to change into. So as she watches the blood, sweat, and dirt wash from her skin and sink into the drain…she can’t help but feel tears well up in her eyes. Now that she had a minute to think—to really think about something other than where she was going to go next, or how she was going to find food, or water—she thought about all the things that she couldn’t afford to worry about before. 

Like her family, that were all dead. 

I’m so sorry Remy. I gotta go, be careful. 

Get back to the tree. 

It doesn’t surprise Remy when she looks in the mirror and doesn’t recognize the person looking back at her. It certainly wasn’t the bright eyed young girl that she had seen last. Remy didn’t know who she had become—she didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror, simply because it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her reflection in the mirror, it wasn’t Remington Whitaker. It was an entirely new person—a girl that had a completely different mind set, a completely new set or morals, and values, and most importantly, a newly constructed list of priorities. 

Number one on the list of importance had suddenly gone from the generic be successful, to survive today. 

Remy’s fist pulls back and slams into the wall next to the mirror. She shakes out the pain in her hand and exits the bathroom. Remy limps over to the couch, and falls back on it, stretching out her right leg. She rubbed the wound on her shoulder lightly, feeling it start to scab over and heal. That’s what Remy needed to do…she needed to heal. Inside and out before she did anything.

Remy stands up and leaves her room, walking into the empty hallway. She limps back down to the dining area, and sees Glenn and Daryl, both freshly showered sitting at the table, drinks in front of them. Glenn sways in his seat and smiles at Remy. "Hey!" 

She limps forward and grabs the bottle of whiskey. She grabs a glass from the bar and pours herself a shot. Glenn laughs. "You're pretty Remy." 

Remy looks back at Glenn, mid pour. She looks at Daryl, who's already laughing. She downs another shot. "Glenn, I think you drinking might have been a bad idea." 

He takes another sip of whiskey. "What are you talking about?!" He slurs. "This is fun!" 

Remy puts the bottle down and sits down at the end of the table. Glenn laughs again, and puts his head down. "I'm tired." 

And within a few seconds, Glenn was snoring. Remy kicks him in the leg and he stuttered, sitting back in his chair instead of leaning forward, and the snoring subsided.

Daryl moves forward and sits on the other side of the table, taking the last end seat. Remy sips her whiskey. "He doesn't handle liquor well." 

Daryl smirks. "Apparently not." 

Remy's silent and Daryl stares down at her, taking a sip from his bottle. "What's botherin’ you?”

She looks over at him, and puts the glass to her lips, taking another burning sip. "It's nothin." 

"It looks like its drivin’ you crazy." He replies. 

Remy stares at him. She shakes her head. "I've met Jenner before, and I know I have. I just can't remember." Remy rubs her eyes and holds her forehead, thinking past the headache. 

"That why you're watchin his every move?" 

Remy sighs. "Whatever it is that I remember him from—it can't be good. All I know is, every time I look at him I feel an intense need to put a bullet in his head." 

Daryl nods. "You sure you didn't see him in the city?”

Remy shakes her head. "It was before all of this. I just can't remember." 

Glenn stirs, and then settles again. Remy picks up the bottle of whiskey and slides the glass onto the table; she takes a sip from the bottle and looks up at the ceiling. The air coming out of the vent sent a chill down her spine. 

'You're one cold bitch Remington' her father’s voice rings through her head. 

Her father. Jenner. Remy sits up. 

"What?" Daryl asks. 

"That piece of shit." 

Remy jumps up, and her hand moves to the knife in her belt. She moves toward the door and Daryl jumps up after her. Remy moves down the hallway quickly, taking only one turn before she's in the large room Jenner had brought them into before. 

She passes Rick on her way in, and hears Daryl yelling to Rick from behind her not to let Remy get near Jenner. Rick tries to grab Remy's arm, but she pulls away from him roughly. Jenner stands up as Remy moves toward. 

"You thought I wouldn't figure it out?" Remy laughs, grabbing his shirt and slamming him against a desk. "You thought I didn't know you son of a bitch?!" 

"Please let me explain!" 

Remy feels someone pull her back roughly. "Easy." Daryl holds her back as she reaches for Jenner again. 

Rick steps in front of Jenner. "Wait a minute...wait. Remy, tell me what's goin on." 

Remy reaches for Jenner again, and Daryl pulls her further away. 

"My dad used to work here," Remy explains, to which Rick looks surprised. "He wasn't a doctor, he was a janitor. The only thing he could do drunk. One night he comes home out of his mind. Told me he heard some doctors talkin about somethin big that was comin—a doctor named Jenner—"

"We barely knew anything about it then! We were just taking precaution!" 

"And what about all the dead people on the street outside?!" Remy yells. "Think they would have liked to take precautions?!" 

Remy tries to grab Jenner again, but Rick takes a step forward and Remy can’t get out of the iron grip Daryl has her in. 

Rick holds his hands out. "Tell me what happened." he says slowly. 

"My father went missing for a week. He went to work one day, and just didn't come back, I thought he was on another bender, goin bar to bar like usual, and then he came back beat to hell, yellin about how we needed to leave the city. A car dropped him off that night, and I could only see one other person in the car with him. Now when we got here I didn't know where I recognized Jenner from. Tonight I realized that Jenner was the driver of that car—the car that held the men that beat my father nearly to death. 

"Then we started hearing about the attacks. My dad told me and my brother we had to leave the city, but by the time we were leaving, too many people were comin in. The next day they started dropping the bombs. My dad tried to come back here, find out what was happening, when it would go away, anything. My father was inside for all of five minutes when Jenner here kicked him out, forced him back into the street. Me and my brother ran—and I haven't seen my father since." 

"There wasn't anything I could do for him!" Jenner exclaims. "People were dying!" 

"I was out there you bastard! What do you know about people dying?!" 

Get back to the tree.

"Okay, okay," Rick sighs. "Daryl, get her out of here." 

Rick moves back in front of Jenner as Remy reaches for him again. Daryl drags her out of the room. He stands in front of her when she tries to go back into the room. "Dammit girl! Stop fightin!" 

"I'm gonna kill him!" 

"What in the hell is goin on?" T-dog walks down the hallway. 

"She's tryna kill Jenner." Daryl mutters, grabbing Remy's arm as she reaches for her knife. "Alright, let's go." 

Daryl and T-dog pull Remy down the hall and she's put down in a chair in the dining room. Daryl puts a glass in front of her and pours her two shots. Whiskey. And tequila. 

Remy takes them both, one after the other and the shaking in her hands starts to fade. Remy hadn’t felt anger like that in a long time…mostly because—with it being the apocalypse—there wasn’t anything to be angry about. 

"What the hell'd he do?" T-dog asks. 

"Killed my father." Remy mutters. 

T-dog stares at her for a second. "You mean he...actually killed your father?" 

Remy sighs and takes another shot. "My father came here for help. Jenner kicked him out. My father never made it back."

T-dog runs a hand down his face and takes the bottle of whiskey, taking a long sip. "All this damn shit is too much." 

Remy runs a hand through her hair and takes another shot, feeling the warmth radiate through her body and calm her down. Remy puts her elbows on the table and leans her head into her hands. "I don't know why I ever thought this was gonna be a good idea." 

T-dog has another shot. "I'm goin to bed. I'm too tired for this." 

He leaves the room and Daryl sits down across from Remy. "Your dad was a drunk?" 

Remy swallows alcohol and nods. "He was. It was bad when my mom was alive…when she did nothing but beat the hell outta me…somehow it got worse when she died. He’d black out and he’d blame me for her death—he decided that she was right in saying I deserved to get hit. He picked up right where she left off.”

"He was an abusive drunk…then why do you care about him dyin?" 

Remy doesn't think the question’s too harsh—he's right. Why should Remy care that the man who put her through hell disappeared? 

She scoffs. "I ask myself that question every goddamn day.”

"Ever get an answer?" 

She shakes her head, and chuckles humorlessly as she looks down at her whiskey. “I used to wish he’d disappear. I used to pray and beg for somethin to happen to him. So I could leave—so he would stop stealing every penny I made, and I would leave and never come back. And now he’s gone—and I wanna be happy…but the thought that he’s out there as one of them—no one deserves that.” 

Daryl scoffs. “I think any piece of shit that’s so pathetic he would raise his hand to a woman, let alone his own daughter, deserves whatever he gets.” 

Remy’s eyes snap over to Daryl. She laughs, and wonders why no one in the group particularly liked Daryl…why they all thought he was a volatile, sad excuse for a human being. Remy wondered why he secluded himself—why he didn’t show this side of himself around everyone else. Why he didn’t care about them, and show that he was a decent human being. 

Remy doesn’t know if it’s the alcohol making her head buzz, or if it’s what Daryl had just said to her, but Remy felt her heart start to beat faster when she looked into his blue eyes, shining from the liquor. She stands up quickly, and takes her bottle. “I’m gonna go get completely out of my mind drunk and pass out in my room.” 

He smirks. “Have fun.” 

Remy leaves the room, and takes a sip from her bottle as she walks down the hall, back to her room. The hallways of the CDC were completely empty, and if it weren’t for the bright fluorescent lights, the hallways almost reminded Remy of the woods with its peaceful silence. the only thing the hallway didn’t have was the feeling of home Remy got in the woods. Despite what Remy wanted to believe and despite what she knew a few of those in the group believed…Remy knew this wouldn’t last. Not for her at least. 

Remy flips the light on when she gets to her room, and closes the door behind her; she sips the bottle of whiskey and falls back on the couch, where she lays and stares at the bow leaning on the wall across the room, and the arrows laying on the floor next to it. Remy sips from the bottle and aches for fresh air as she leans her head back on the couch, which was something she never thought she would crave again. Remy knew she would beg and plead for water, for food, shelter, safety…but one thing Remy didn’t ever think she would miss again was fresh air. Though this shelter was a dream—Remy knew it was temporary…just like everything else. 

Nothing had changed just because the group was here now. The end of the world was still outside, whether or not they could see it. It almost seemed like some in the group thought otherwise…or they wanted to. They wanted to stay here, and think that while they were underground everything was okay above them. Remy wished more than anything that they would resurface and everything would be gone, that there would be no more walkers—everything would just be okay again. And she could go home, with or without her father. Or her brother. Remy would be broken, but she would be alive—physically anyway—and safe. 

Remy takes a deep sip from the bottle and feels her head spinning. She couldn’t let herself want things. Remy couldn’t let herself hope for anything. She kicks off her boots and pulls the knife from her belt, holding it tightly in her hand as she feels her eyes slide closed. Get back to the tree.

 

 

 

Remy sits up, the nightmare jolting her out of her deep sleep. Get back to the tree. The empty whiskey bottle falls from the couch onto the floor, and Remy sighs, and runs a hand through her hair. I’m so sorry Remy. She rubs her eyes and stands up leisurely, her head aching. Remy groans as she limps into the bathroom, and turns on the tap water in the sink. The nightmare fades gradually from her mind as she splashes the cold water onto her face. She just had to wake up…that’s what she told herself. Just don’t think about it. Remy looks at the girl in the mirror, and disregarded the shaking in her hands as she walks back into her room to get dressed. 

Remy thought about the last time she had a hangover, and even though it felt like years ago, she could remember the night her father went missing and she sat in the kitchen and drank a whole bottle of his bourbon. She could remember hoping he wouldn’t come home, and praying that he would walk through the door any second at the same time. Remy stayed irresolute the whole night as she downed shot after shot—her body ached with phantom pains when she thought about her father, from the beatings she took as he cursed her mother for leaving him with two kids that he didn’t know how to take care of. 

Remy remembered how she would crawl into her room after her father passed out and clean up the cuts and stitch whatever wounds she had acquired in the time that he got so angry he couldn’t control himself to completely wearing himself down. Remy slept with a knife in her hand every night since her mother died, just in case her father awoke from his stupor sometime in the middle of the night and decided that it was time for Remy to go too. 

 

Remy enters the dining room some time later, where most of the group was already awake, and eating breakfast—a breakfast that looked like an improvement from what the group normally had. Remy sits down in an open seat and replies to the good mornings that are offered to her. Glenn is holding his head over his plate, and Remy smirks, knowing he couldn’t possibly be feeling any better than she did.

“Sleep well?” Lori asks, biting into a piece of toast. 

Remy shrugs lightly, doing her best to banish the nightmare from her mind. “Good enough.” 

Lori nods, understanding. 

Rick walks into the room, and approaches the table. “Morning.” 

Carl smirks up at him. “Are you hungover? Mom said you’d be.” 

Rick sits down at the table and smirks. “Mom is right.” 

“Mom has that annoying habit.” Lori grins. 

T-dog walks in from the kitchen. “Eggs.” he announces, carrying a frying pan. “Powered, but I do ‘em good.” 

Glenn groans. 

Dale laughs, and T-dog continues. “Bet you can’t tell.” He scoops a small pile of eggs onto Glenn’s plate. “Protein helps the hangover.” 

“Where’d all this come from?” Rick asks, holding up a bottle of aspirin. Remy perks up at the sight of it. Rick fumbles with the cap before holding it out to Lori. “Can you help me?”

“Jenner,” Lori replies, taking the bottle. “He thought we could use it, well, some of us.” 

“Don’t, ever, ever, ever, let me drink again.” Glenn pleads. 

Lori holds the bottle over to Remy, and she takes it graciously, pouring out two pills into her hands. She swallows them dry and sighs in contentment. Pain medication…everyone missed it. 

Shane walks into the room and Remy instantly feels the atmosphere change. Things got tense. “Hey.” 

Remy glances up at Shane as he walks by and she stabs her fork into her eggs. 

“Hey.” Rick replies. “You feel as bad as I do?” 

“Worse.” Shane calls back quietly as he gets coffee. 

“The hell happened to you?” T-dog asks, looking at Shane. “Your neck.”

Shane sits down and Remy looks at the scratch marks on his neck, three lines ran straight down his neck, the skin surrounding the cuts was red and puffy, some dried blood still on the edge of the wounds, like Shane tried to clean them but didn’t do a very good job.

“Must’ve done it in my sleep.” 

Remy knows he’s lying instantly, and she glances back at Rick to see if he noticed as well. Lori catches Remy’s eye, as she stares down at her breakfast. 

“Never seen you do that before.” Rick says. 

“Me neither.” Shane mutters, looking at Lori. “Not like me at all.”

Remy sits back—she didn’t know how she missed it. Shane and Lori? Lori was Rick's wife…and Shane was his best friend. Remy sighed lightly, and it went unnoticed. She was worried that this camp was going to end up like those soap operas her mother watched on TV all day. Remy was just counting down the days until she was out of the trap she was falling in. 

Jenner walks in the room, and Remy tenses up. Rick glances at her and then at Jenner. 

“Mornin’.” Jenner briefly stares at Remy. 

“Mornin doc.” A few call. 

“Doctor, I don’t mean to slam you with questions first thing…” Dale starts. 

“But you will anyway,” Jenner mumbles. 

“We didn’t come here for the eggs,” Andrea assures him. 

Remy grips her fork tightly as she stares at Jenner, surprisingly losing her appetite. She was completely sober now—but if anything, it just made her angrier. 

Jenner turns around and looks at the group. 

 

Remy follows behind everyone else as they walk into the same room that she attempted (unfortunately) to kill Jenner in the night before—Zone five. Jenner walks straight toward a computer. “Give me a playback of TS-19.”

“Playback of TS-19.” Vi replies. 

Images begin to appear on a screen in front of the group, flashing by quickly, like it’s zooming in on a grid, only it’s a blurry image and it starts to get clearer the farther in it goes. The image starts to focus as Jenner speaks. 

“Few people ever got a chance to see this,” Jenner tells them. “Very few.” 

Remy watches as an outline of a person’s head appears, and it clears up again for another image. 

“Is that a brain?” Carl asks. 

“An extraordinary one,” Jenner replies, he thinks for a moment. “Not that it matters…in the end.” He looks back at the screen. “Take us in for EIV.” 

“Enhanced Internal View.” Vi announces, and the screen zooms in on the brain. Remy watches the brain activity of a healthy person on the screen. 

“What are those lights?” Shane asks. 

Remy moves forward, intrigued now. This was something that peaked her interest…for once. She opens her mouth to answer Shane’s question. “It’s a person’s life. Experiences, memories. It’s everything.” 

Jenner nods once to her, and takes over. “Somewhere in all that organic wiring…all those ripples of light, is you. The thing that makes you unique. And human.” 

“You don’t make sense, ever?” Daryl asks, looking slightly confused. 

“Those are synapses,” Jenner says. “Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says, does, or thinks from the moment of birth, to the moment of death.” 

“Death?” Rick echoes. “That’s what this is? A vigil?” 

“Yes,” Jenner replies, nodding lightly. “Or, rather, the playback of the vigil.” 

“This person died?” Andrea asks shakily, moving forward. “Who?” 

“Test subject nineteen,” Jenner answers. “Someone who was bitten, and infected, and volunteered to have us record the process. Vi, scan forward to the first event.” Remy didn’t like how Jenner was rushing through this…like he was on a timed schedule. 

“Scanning to first event.” 

The screen jumps forward, and the lights in the brain start to dim, darkness moving through the stems like liquid, filling all the light and blocking it out. 

“What is that?” Glenn asks, shocked. 

“It invades the brain, like meningitis, the adrenal glands hemorrhage,” Jenner explains. “The brain goes into shutdown, then the major organs.” 

The body convulses, and the brain completely turns black, the light slowly dulling and getting completely taken over by the darkness. The stems completely disappear, and Remy watches the brain die. 

“Then death,” Jenner continues. “Everything you ever were, or ever will be…gone.” 

“Is that what happened to Jim?” Sophia asks. 

Carol looks down at her sadly. “Yes.” 

Jenner watches Andrea, who’s looking closer to tears by the second. Lori opens her mouth. “She lost somebody two days ago. Her sister.” 

Jenner moves closer to her. “I lost somebody too; I know how devastating it is.” 

“Scan to the second event.” Jenner calls out, completely forgetting the comfort he was giving Andrea. 

“Scanning to second event.” 

“The resurrection times vary widely. We have reports of it happening in as little as three minutes, the longest we heard of was eight hours. In the case of this patient, it was two hours, one minute, seven seconds.” Jenner speaks robotically. 

The stems in the brain begin to flash again, a deep red, and when Remy thinks the light should stretch back up the stems and into the rest of the brain, it stays in one place, balled up and flashing darkly. 

“It restarts the brain?” Lori asks in disbelief. 

Remy moves even closer to the screen, staring up at it, not able to keep quiet anymore. She needed to understand, and the best way for her to figure something out was to say it out loud. “No, just the brain stem. It gets them up, and moving. Basic instinct is the only thing that drives them. There’s no thoughts, or logic, or reasoning, just primal needs.”

“But, they’re not alive,” Rick questions, looking between Jenner and Remy. 

“You tell me,” Jenner moves back. 

Rick stares at the screen and shakes his head. “It’s nothing like before, most of that brain is dark.” 

“Dark, lifeless, dead, the frontal lobe, the neo cortex, the human part, that doesn’t come back. The you part. Just a shell driven by mindless instinct.”

Something flashes across the screen quickly, leaving a large gap in the head of the brain. 

“God, what was that?” Carol asks. 

“He shot his patient in the head.” Remy states, staring at Jenner's back. 

“Vi, power down the main screen, and the work stations.” Jenner calls. 

“Powering down main screen and work stations.” 

“You have no idea what it is, do you?” Andrea accuses. 

“It could be microbial, viral, parasitic, fungal…” 

“Or the wrath of God,” Jacqui says sternly. 

“There is that,” Jenner nods. 

“Somebody must know something,” Andrea says. “Somebody. Somewhere.” 

“There are others, right?” Carol asks. “Other facilities?” 

Jenner turns to her. “There may be some. People like me—”

“But you don’t know, how can you not know?” Rick demands. 

“Everything went down, communications, directives, all of it. I’ve been in the dark for almost a month.” 

“So it’s not just here,” Remy says. “There’s nothing left anywhere.”

Jenner's silent, and the group gets nervous and fidgety as the information sinks in. They were alone. Well and truly alone in this shit storm…and they knew it now. For sure. 

“Jesus,” Jacqui breathes. 

Daryl rubs his eyes. “Man, I’m gonna get shit-faced drunk. Again.” 

“Jenner, I know this has been taxing for you, and I hate to ask one more question, but that clock, it’s counting down, what happens at zero?” 

Remy looks over to the clock Dale’s referring to, and sees that there’s exactly one hour left on it. 

“The…basement generators…they run out of fuel.” Remy knows immediately there’s something he’s not telling them. 

Rick speaks before Remy can. “And then?” 

Jenner doesn’t answer and Remy looks up to the ceiling. “Vi, what happens when the power runs out?” 

“When the power runs out, facility wide decontamination will occur.” 

Jenner leaves the room, leaving the group to contemplate what the computerized voice had just told them. The room was so silent Remy was starting to think no one was breathing around her. Remy looks around the room, and judging by the looks on the faces around her, she was pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the sound of decontamination. 

 

Remy looks up from the pistol in her lap when she hears the air stop running. Remy puts her gun back together as quickly as possible and stands up, putting her pistol in the holster on her thigh. She reaches up and puts her hand under the vent by the door to feel no air coming out. Remy hears talking out in the hallway and pulls her door to open to see who was creating the noise. Remy saw Jenner first, walking down the hallway in the direction of her room, some following after him and some hanging out of their rooms like Remy was. 

“Hey what’s goin on? Why’s everything turning off?” Daryl asks, whiskey bottle handing from his hand. 

Jenner grabs the bottle mid stride and walks farther up the hallway, his face pensive, causing deep lines in his forehead that made him look older. Remy didn’t care about Jenner or his wellbeing, but with a look like the one he was wearing…she worried about everyone else’s. “Energy use is being prioritized.” 

“Air isn’t a priority?” Dale asks, following after Jenner now, using that same tone that he always did. 

“And lights?” 

“It’s not up to me,” Jenner says as the lights in the hallway flip off. Remy follows after him and the small group he has building up. “Zone five is shutting itself down.” 

“Ay, what the hell’s that mean?” Daryl calls after him, catching up quickly. 

Jenner doesn’t answer, and Daryl walks up behind him. “Hey man I’m talkin to you. What do you mean it’s shutting itself down? How can a buildin do anything?” 

“You’d be surprised.” Jenner mutter absent-mindedly. His mind wasn’t with the group following him through the underground hallways, no, Jenner was somewhere else completely with other people, talking about other things. 

Rick, Glenn, Shane, and T-dog run into the room below the group, their footsteps echoing against the metal panels that made up the floors in Zone five. “Rick?” Lori calls, leaning over a railing to look down below. 

The group follows Jenner down the stairs and Rick greets him at the bottom, concern etched into his face. “Jenner, what’s happening?” 

“The system is dropping all the nonessential uses of power,” Jenner explains, not stopping once. “It’s designed to keep the computers running until the last possible second. That started as we approached the half hour mark. Right on schedule.” 

The group follows Jenner through to the sector floorboard and he sips from the bottle of alcohol, just one quick shot before he hands it back to Daryl, who grabs it from his hand, looking offended that Jenner would dare touch his alcohol. Jenner looks back at Andrea. “It was the French.” 

“What?” 

“They were the last ones to hold out as far as I know.” he clarifies. “While our people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed in the lab till the end. They thought they were close to a solution.” 

“What happened?” Jacqui asks. 

“The same thing that’s happening here,” Jenner says. “No power grid. Ran out of juice. The world runs on fossil fuel…I mean, how stupid is that?” 

Shane jumps forward. “Let me tell you somethin’—” 

Rick grabs his arm. “The hell with it Shane.” 

Rick turns to the group. “Lori, grab our things. Everybody, get your stuff, we’re getting out of here now!” 

Remy immediately turns to leave, the whole group doing the same, because they all got the feeling then, the feeling that they should have had for the day they were underground. The CDC wasn’t permanent. There were no more doctors, no research was being done, the food supply would run out soon, so would the water and the electricity. The underground shelter wouldn’t be much better than outside soon, and the doors were locked behind them. Remy just knew the sooner she could get away from Jenner, and be outside—in the woods, in the fresh air—the better off she would be. 

An alarm rings through the air, making everyone that’s running come to a halting stop, and spin around. 

“What’s that?!” 

“Thirty minutes to decontamination,” Vi announces, the voice echoing through the large room and making Remy’s chest hurt. 

“Doc what’s goin on here!?” 

Jenner moves toward another desk and scans a card over a small device. Remy watches as he puts a number in, knowing that whatever he was doing would crash down on them in a second. 

“Everybody! Ya’ll heard Rick! Get your stuff and let’s go now!” Shane yells. 

And then the automatic door that lead to the hallway slams down shut in front of them. A few sit there and stare at the door, their brains not comprehending just what had happened. Remy turns around slowly. 

“Did you just lock us in!?” Glenn calls out, turning to look at the group. “He just locked us in!” 

“You son of a bitch!” Daryl runs for Jenner. “You locked us in here!?” 

“Shane!” Rick yells. Shane dives after Daryl, pulling him away from Jenner with his arms behind his back, which didn’t stop Daryl from struggling. 

Remy slides her fingers over her pistol as her heart officially starts to race and watches Rick move forward quickly. “Jenner, open that door now.” 

“There’s no point,” he insists, sitting down in a desk chair. “Everything topside is locked down, the emergency exits are sealed.” 

Remy moves forward, pulling out her pistol. “I don’t think you heard him Jenner! He told you to open the goddamn door!” 

“Shane!” Rick yells again. Everyone that was preoccupied holding back Daryl jumped forward to grab Remy, before she could get her gun to his head. 

“That’s not something I control!” Jenner yells, making everyone turn to him. “The computers do! I told you, once that front door closed it wouldn’t open again, you heard me say that!” 

Remy pulls herself out of T-dog’s grip on her arm, and begins pacing as the room falls silent with tension and anticipation. Remy felt something building up inside of her, something that would explode soon. She didn’t want to be here anymore—she needed to get out. Get back to the tree. Remy felt the air leaving her lungs, and something in her throat clawing to get another breath in, but the large gulp of air Remy took in didn’t feel like much. 

“It’s better this way.” Jenner presses. 

“What is?” Remy snaps, moving forward again, pistol still in hand. “What happens in twenty eight minutes?”

Jenner stays silent; Remy cocks her pistol. “What happens in twenty eight minutes!?” 

“You know what this place is!?” Jenner stands up, the roar that came out of his was unexpected, and Remy felt like with the way he was glaring at her, Jenner was trying to intimidate her, which Remy would have laughed at had this been a different situation. “We protected the public from very nasty stuff! Weaponized small pox! Ebola strains that could wipe out half the country! Stuff you don’t want getting out! Ever!” 

Remy began to pace again. 

Jenner sits down. “In the event of a catastrophic power failure, a terrorist attack, for example, H.I.T.s are deployed to prevent any organisms from getting out.” 

“H.I.T.s?” Rick asks. 

“Vi, define,” Jenner calls. 

“H.I.T.s - high-impulse thermobaric fuel-air explosive consists of a two-stage aerosol ignition which produces a blast wave of significantly greater power and duration than any other known explosive except nuclear. The vacuum-pressure effect ignites the oxygen between 5,000 and 6,000 degrees and is used when the greatest loss of life and damage to structures is desired.” 

Remy feels the air leave her lungs again and she tightens her grip on her pistol. If she didn’t want to put a bullet in Jenner's head before, she undeniably wanted to now. This wasn’t how Remy would die. No. Remy could accept that one day she would almost certainly get attacked by a walker, and she could recognize that as her way of death…but being blown up in a building with a group of people she barely knew? That was deplorable, in Remy’s mind. 

Rick moves forward and hugs Lori. 

“Sets the air on fire,” Jenner says quietly. “No pain, an end to sorrow. Grief. Regret. Everything.” 

Remy watches Daryl, Glenn and Rick move toward the door. Daryl throws the whiskey bottle at it. “Open the damn door!” 

“Out of my way.” Shane yells as he runs up with an axe. 

Shane and Daryl begin to hack at the door, barely putting scratches in the thick metal. Remy moves forward, still gripping her pistol. She walks up the ramp. “Move!” 

Daryl and Shane move back and Remy pulls the trigger, lodging the bullet in the door, but barely making a dent. She fires again—and again, and again, until her gun clicks. “Son of a bitch!” 

She spins around and moves back down the ramp, hearing Shane and Daryl behind her.   
“Can’t make a dent,” Shane mutters quietly to Rick. 

“Those doors are built to withstand a rocket launcher.” 

“Well your head ain’t!” Daryl runs up, moving toward Jenner, the axe in his hands over his head.

Rick, T-dog, and Dale jump forward and stop him. Remy wished they would just let Daryl do it. If she was going to die, she wanted to see Jenner get eradicated first. 

“You do want this,” Jenner tells Rick desperately. “Last night, you said, you knew it was just a matter of time before everybody you loved was dead.” 

Everyone turns to Rick. “What? You really said that? After all your big talk?” Shane demands. 

“I had to keep hope alive, didn't I?” Rick says quietly. 

“There is no hope. There never was.” Jenner states solemnly. 

“There's always hope. Maybe it won't be you, maybe not be here. But somebody somewhere...”

“What part of "everything is gone" do you not understand?” Andrea scoffs. 

“Listen to your friend. She gets it. This is what takes us down. This is our extinction event.” Jenner sits down. 

“This isn’t right,” Carol cries. “You can’t just keep us here!” 

“One tiny moment, a millisecond…no pain.” 

“My daughter doesn’t deserve to die like this!” 

“Wouldn’t it be kinder? More compassionate, to just hold your loved ones and wait for the clock to run down?” 

What if you don’t have loved ones asshole? 

Remy hears a shotgun cock. She turns around to see Shane moving forward. 

“Shane!” Rick yells, trying to hold him back. 

“Stay out of my way Rick! Stay out of my way!” 

Shane holds the gun in front of Jenner's face. “Open that door or I’ma blow your head off. Do you hear me!?” 

“Brother, this is not the way. You do this, we never get out of here.” Rick tries to coerce Shane into dropping the weapon, and for a second, the look in Rick's eyes says that he doesn’t want to. 

“Shane, you listen to him,” Lori calls. 

In one way, Remy wants to pull Rick back and let Shane blow Jenner's head into pieces, despite how completely wrong it is. But…take away a person’s peace of mind, their safety—they turn into an animal. Remy was starting to feel like she was in a cage, and there wasn’t a feeling she hated worse than feeling confined.

“He dies, we all die!” Rick tells Shane. 

Shane yells, and points the gun across the room, pulling the trigger and taking out lights and computers. There goes the built up rage. 

Rick grabs the gun from him and elbows Shane in the face, knocking him down. Rick stands over Shane, holding the end of the gun to his face. “You done now? Are you done?” 

“Yeah I guess we all are.” Shane hisses. 

Rick stands up, and looks around the group. He turns to Jenner. “I think you’re lying.” 

“What?” 

“You’re lying about no hope. If that were true, you’d of bolted with the rest. Taken the easy way out. You didn’t. You chose the hard path, why?” 

“It doesn’t matter.” Jenner replies, shaking his head. 

“It does matter,” Rick scoffs. “It always matters. You stayed, when others ran, why?” 

“Not because I wanted to,” Jenner states resolutely. “I made a promise. To her.” Jenner points to the screen in the front of the room. “My wife.” 

“Test subject nineteen was your wife?” Lori asks slowly. 

“She begged me to keep going as long as I could,” Jenner rushes. “How could I say no?” 

Remy jumps when she hears the axe against the metal door again. 

“She was dying.” 

Bang. 

“It should have been me on that table.” 

Bang. 

“It wouldn’t have been a lost to anybody; she was a loss to the world.” 

Bang. 

Remy stops listen to Jenner talk about how his wife was so smart, and how pathetic he was. She couldn’t breathe—that cage was getting smaller and the air was running out. 

“—that’s all we want,” Remy listens to Rick. “A choice—and chance.” 

“Let us keep trying as long as we can,” Lori begins to cry. 

Jenner takes a deep breath, and moves forward. “I told you topside’s locked down—I can’t open those.” 

She watches Jenner go back over to the same desk as before, and scan the same card, and punch in a few numbers, and subsequently she hears the door open behind her. 

“Come on!” Daryl yells. 

“Come on let’s go!” “Let’s go!” 

Remy moves forward quickly, abandoning her limp. Four minutes left didn’t leave much time for a jacked up knee. Remy and a few others run down the hall, and grab the bags from the rooms to make it as quick of a getaway as they could make it, everyone just grabbed some bags and ran—it didn’t matter who they belonged to. Remy enters her own room and throws on her backpack, and slings the bow and arrows over her shoulder, and grabs whatever’s left in the other rooms next to hers. Shane’s running down the hallway when she leaves her room and she jogs after him, going back into zone five to see Jacqui and T-dog having a rushed and loud conversation.

Remy hands bags to whoever has an open arm and her hands begin to shake in the eagerness to get out of the building that would soon be coming down around them. 

“Just get out!” Jacqui pushes T-dog back, and Shane grabs his arm. 

“Come on man.” 

“Let’s go!” 

Dale moves forward and Jacqui walks back over to Jenner. 

“I’m staying too,” Andrea announces. 

“Andrea, no!” Dale moves forward. 

Dale looks back at the group. “Just go! Go!” 

Remy starts running instantly, and all she can hear is the sound of her own heart in her ears and the group sprints down the hallway, and up to the first floor. The entirety of the group run toward the doors, and none are surprised when they don’t open with just a push.

“Does it work!?” Remy hears Glenn yell. 

“No!” 

Remy throws the back of her shotgun into the glass of a window, not getting even a crack out of the action. Remy looks over and watches T-dog throw a chair into the window, and still nothing. 

“Dog, get down! Get down!” Shane yells, holding up a gun. 

T-dog jumps off the ledge by the biggest window in the room and moves back. Shane fires at the window—barely cracking the glass. “Jesus.” 

“The glass won’t break!?” Sophia asks, scared. 

“Rick!” Carol calls, moving forward, digging something out of a bag. “I have somethin that might help.” 

“I don’t think a nail file’s gonna do it,” Shane mutters, pacing behind Rick. 

“Your first morning at camp, when I washed your uniform, I found this in your pocket.” Carol holds up a grenade in her shaking hand and Remy moves forward. 

Rick takes it. “Look out!” 

Remy runs back instead, and leans her back against the wall on the other side of the room. Rick removes the pin and looks panicked for a second before he throws the grenade.

“Oh shit!” Rick yells as he runs toward the rest of the group. 

Remy covers her head and the explosion shakes her holds body as she hears the glass finally shatter. Remy jumps to her feet and follows after the group hastily, pulling her shotgun up as she jumps through the window and sees the walkers already on their feet. She shoots the first in the forehead as the group runs forward toward the cars still lined up on the street. 

Remy pulls in another breath quickly and shoots another walker as she approaches Daryl’s truck. She doesn’t waste a second jumping in and throwing her bow and arrows to the floor. Remy looks ahead of them and sees everyone ducking down in their cars. Remy had almost forgotten about the building about to explode, and she’s only reminded when she hears the explosion. 

“Fuck,” Daryl yells as Remy feels something yank her down and she hits the seat, feeling Daryl laying half on top of her, covering most of her body if the explosion reached out to the cars. It’s the longest few seconds of Remy’s life as she listens to the roar of the fire outside the truck, and the thunderous explosions that make the building collapse into a heap of rubble. 

Remy sits up when she feels the extra weight leave her body. The building is on the ground, nothing but broken glass and cement remains. There was nothing left, nothing that resembled any kind of structure or foundation. Remy takes in a shaky breath and sees Dale and Andrea running toward the Winnebago, feeling relief that Andrea changed her mind, last second or not. Remy runs a hand through her hair and rubs her eyes as the cars all start to move again, leaving behind the now non-existent CDC building. Remy felt all optimism leave her body as they pulled away. 

If the CDC couldn’t give the group any kind of safety…then what could? What ever would? 

Remy watches the black smoke in the air in the side mirror as they drive down the highway, leaning her head against the window. 

“You’re bleedin’.” Daryl’s voice breaks her gaze away. 

Remy looks down at her shoulder, to see blood soaking through her shirt. She pulls at the collar of her shirt to see the broken stitches on the arrow wound. “I’ll be fine.” she says quietly. _Don’t you always have to be?_

Get back to the tree.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4: 

Remy was basking in the silence of the woods around her, her eyes closed, her breathing steady, nothing to disturb her or the places her thoughts were wandering to—which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, she realized. Remy hadn’t felt so peaceful in months, when she last had the feeling of safety she didn’t dare let herself feel ever since, or ever again. Has it really been months? Remy shakes her head and walks farther into the foliage, her boots carefully missing any branches or fallen leaves as to keep quiet. 

Remy tries to force her thoughts elsewhere. _Think about something else. Anything else. Anything else._

_“Run Remy!”_

Remy sighs, the memories flooding her brain demanded attention, and chills ran up her spine when she heard their screams in her head. You didn’t care about them. They were nothing to you. Let it go. Remy treks through the thick bushes, making sure to keep sight of the road behind her so she didn’t get lost in the green maze ahead of her. Remy had gotten lost in those months before, she refused to let herself think about it, however the thoughts were inconveniencing her now. Right now, Remy couldn’t afford to carry the past around with her, not when there were other things to do. 

_“Don’t leave me! Please!”_

Remy shakes the voice from her head again, but nevertheless, succumbs to the faces swimming through her mind. 

 

~~

_“Honey has an unlimited shelf life.” Remy thinks bitterly to herself as she pours the thick substance onto another stale cracker as she sat in the isle of an abandoned convenience store. The cracker barely broke apart between her teeth no matter how much she chewed, but the honey covered up the awful taste of the cardboard in disguise. “Honey can kiss my ass.”_

_Remy knew she was unnecessarily worked up over a topping, but she hadn’t eaten anything else in two days and she was getting impatient. Remy was told to stay in the store the day before, and cabin fever was hitting hard and fast, the only food she had sitting in her stomach heavily. The store was hot, almost unbearably, but she couldn’t expect anything less from the beginning of summer in Georgia. Remy knew she could leave the store, enter the woods, get some fresh air—and kill a squirrel while she was at it—in a half an hour, tops, but it wasn’t worth the risk to her. She wouldn’t be able to face Jason if he caught her._

_Remy shoves another honey topped cracker into her mouth and stares at the water stained ceiling, counting the little holes in the tiles to pass the time she had left. At one hundred and forty eight holes, Remy hears footsteps at the front of the store, moving slowly and steadily closer to where she was set up in the last isle. Remy stands slowly, her hand pulling the pistol from her thigh and pulling back the slide slowly, so the metal wouldn’t create its usual clamor._

_Remy peeks out from behind the wall of the isle slowly, to see if the walker was any closer than it had been before, only to find that there was no walker in sight. Remy moves out into the open, still cautious, but moving forward nonetheless. Remy holds her gun out in front of her, so she could react quickly to anything or anyone that was in the store with her. Remy’s heart was starting to race, and it didn’t help the sweat already beading up on her forehead. Remy looked down every isle she passed, expecting a walker around every corner, but finding nothing but half empty shelves and squashed bags of chips._

_Remy hears the footsteps behind her and swings around, her gun landing against the chest of a perfectly alive human, who was laughing when he got slammed against the wall. Remy looks up at the man, and punches his shoulder. “Goddammit Jason!”_

_He continues laughing as the gun is removed from his chest and put back into Remy’s thigh holster. “Just makin’ sure you were alert Rem, don’t get all pissy.” He chuckles._

_Remy sighs and returns to her place on the floor in the rear of the store, picking up another cracker and soaking it in honey. “Did you find food? I’m gonna off myself if I eat another god forsaken cracker.”_

_Something lands in Remy’s lap. “Here princess. Wouldn’t want you to not get everything you want in the apocalypse.”_

_Remy picks up the box of cereal. “Shut up dickhead. You try eating this shit for two days straight and then tell me it’s doesn’t make you think about ways to end it all.”_

_Jason rolls his eyes. “I always knew you were dramatic…but this—”_

_Jason is cut off by the sound of an engine outside the store, the noise making Jason instantly crouch down, and Remy get up to her feet. “Did someone follow you?” she asks._

_“I don’t know.”_

_Jason pulls out his gun, Remy following suit as they move toward the front of the store without being seen. The two move silently in sync as they hear a car door slam and footsteps crunch on the gravel outside._

_“Hello?” a woman’s voice calls, Remy and Jason wait in silence for a moment before the door opens. “Hello? Hey, we’re not here to hurt anyone. We followed someone here…we have a camp, we want to help.”_

_Jason looks at Remy, and points his finger to the back of the store, and nodding his head back, to the right side of the building. He points to himself and points to the front of the store. Remy nods and moves silently back through the aisles until she’s at the back of the store, closer to the position Jason wanted her to take._

_“Who are you?” she hears Jason ask._

_“We followed you here, sorry.” She apologizes quickly before she moves on. “We know you were alone, but we figured you were coming back here to someone. Why else would you be in such a rush, y’know? Like I said, we have a camp, we can bring you back with us.”_

_Remy crosses the store while the woman is distracted with Jason and moves up behind them, gun in hand. The woman didn’t have a weapon, but the hummer outside had a man in the driver’s seat, and Remy didn’t know what he was carrying, so she was far from trusting the people who showed up._

_“Y’all got food?” Remy asks, earning a sharp glare from Jason, and the attention of the woman._

_“Plenty—we found an abandoned house about ten miles from here. Looks like the owners just up and left.”_

_“Or died.” Jason offers._

_The woman nods, looking queasy. “Or that.”_

_Remy and Jason have a silent conversation, Remy successfully getting across that she didn’t trust the woman that seemed a little too nice for the apocalypse, and the man in the truck outside that hadn’t even glanced toward them to make sure the woman was okay. Jason thought it was a risk that they should take—they could handle themselves if the two ended up being trouble, and that was only if they ended up being trouble. Jason thought that maybe some good could come of it. Maybe they would be safe._

_That’s why Remy and Jason ended up in the backseat of the hummer, the man and woman in the front offering them small smiles as they drove._

_“I’m Jenna, this is Roger.” she tells the passengers. “What are your names?”_

_“I’m Jason,” he replies, in a better mood than his partner._

_“Remy.” she mutters._

_“Remy?” Jenna asks. “That’s different…is it short for anything?”_

_“No.” she answers curtly._

_The woman looks a little unsteady with Remy’s tone, but if Remy noticed—she didn’t let it show. Jason sighs lightly—he should have known she’d be like this._

_“You two are from around here?” Jenna asks, picking up on their accent that made everything drawn out, their slow and steady speech wasn’t something easy to miss._

_“Atlanta,” Jason responds._

_Jenna smiles. “I always wanted to see Atlanta…just not the way it is now. We’re from Ohio, we started to move down south a few weeks ago, when we heard that Atlanta was safe.”_

_“Safe is the only thing Atlanta is not right now.” Jason replies kindly._

_Jenna nods at the statement, getting a distant look in her eyes as she does, and turns around to face the windshield again, paying close attention to the asphalt ahead of them. Remy glares at Jason as the hummer speeds down the back roads—it was his fault she was with people she didn’t trust…and he was making small talk. “He’s just trying to be nice.” That stupid voice in the back of Remy’s head tells her. “Nice gets you killed.” she reminds herself._

_The large abandoned house looked safe enough—but that didn’t always mean that there would be no danger. These people were weak, Remy couldn’t help but notice, and she doubted that they took weapons and searched the house up and down for walkers before they shacked up and called it home. Jason and Remy shared a glance before following Jenna and Roger up the stone front steps of the enormous house, which Remy noted were covered in dried up blood. 'Up and left' my ass'_

_Jenna opens the wide front door, no weapon poised, no caution displayed. "How are you still alive?" Remy wonders to herself. Jenna was very clearly not prepared for the danger that usually waited around every corner, and Remy almost felt bad for the woman who she knew would meet her demise sooner rather than later._

_"We're really doin’ this?" Remy whispers to Jason as they follow the two into the house._

_"Yes, Remy we're really doin' this. Food, shelter, the possibility of a real bed...I don't see what's wrong with that. I know you have your whole 'trust no one but me' thing goin' on, but you're just gonna have to get over that and survive for a minute." Jason lectures quietly as the two step over the threshold of the house._

_Jenna and Roger walk down a dimly lit hallway, the sun not quite reaching far enough into the house to supply light. Remy's hand grazes over the top of her pistol as the small group approach the kitchen area of the old house and voices become clearer._

_Roger and Jenna lead them through the doorway of the old fashioned kitchen, with long marble countertops covered in dust and blood, and modern looking appliances that didn't look like they'd been touched in weeks. The creaking of the hardwood floors under the boots of the newcomers went unnoticed as their eyes landed on the group in front of them._

_Eight people were sat in random places around the room, a few kids on the floor, a few women talking at the table, men standing in another corner. None of them looked healthy. Malnourished and underfed were the first two words to pop into Remy's mind. The next few words would not have been suitable for the children in the room to hear._

_Remy and Jason both look to Jenna and roger. "I thought you had plenty of food?" Remy asks, moving forward, no longer in any mood to deal with the two in front of her._

_Jenna can barely hold eye contact. "We did. Three weeks ago."_

_Remy sighs and looks away from her, looking back to Jason, who didn't think this was such a good idea anymore either._

_Remy looks at Jenna. "Why are we here?"_

_"Because we need help." Roger admits._

_Jason scoffs. "The apocalypse happened while you were out, bud...everyone needs help."_

_"You two have survived on your own this far." Jenna points out. "We're barely surviving and there's ten of us."_

_Remy lost all patience. "That's because you're weak. Do you know how many times you could have died between you getting in the car and getting here?"_

_"No, no, I don't." Jenna cries. "That's why we need help. We have no food, we've been eating stale gum and drinking water from the well out back. We need help. Please."_

_Remy waves her hand around the room. "This? This is not our problem. We have enough to worry about as it is, okay? You're not the only people in the world with nothing right now; you'll figure it out just like everyone else did."_

_Remy turns to leave the room--and house--but a hand on her arm stops her. Remy turns back to Jason, who we as giving her the look. The look that Remy could read easier than her favorite book. She sighs, and pulls her arm away from Jason, walking straight through the kitchen to the back door that Remy notes was not locked or barred._

_"Where are you going?" Jenna asks._

_"Hunting. You need food. We have to build your strength up if you're gonna do anything." Remy calls before she leaves the house and treks into the woods._

_~  
Remy reenters the house with six squirrels attached on a string to her belt, which was watched by ten pairs of eyes as she walked toward the counter in the kitchen and brushed the dust off of it before placing the string of animal down on the surface. There were two kids standing at Remy’s hip when she looked down. _

_“We’re gonna eat it raw?” a little girl asks, a look of disgust on her face as she stared at the squirrels._

_“You gotta make some sacrifices in the apocalypse kid.” Remy replies. “Sometimes you gotta eat crackers and honey for two days straight, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to get a raw squirrel.”_

_The little girl scurries away when Remy cuts the first squirrel open, chest to stomach, and starts to pull out the organs that couldn’t be eaten. Remy dumps the contents of the animals into the old trashcan beside the counter, thinking about how far off she’d have to walk to get rid of it later. The eyes in the room never left the animals under Remy’s working hands and knife, their stomachs growling at the thought of food, raw or not._

_Remy finally wipes her knife and her hands on her jeans to clean the blood off and she steps away from the counter. “Eat.”_

_They all move forward at the same time, all ten members of the group grabbing their own squirrel and returning to their seats in seconds, digging into the meat ravenously. Remy stands beside Jason, watching them. “We’re really gonna play house with these people?”_

_Jason glances at her, an unreadable look in his eyes as he speaks. “They need us Remy. They need us more than we need each other, and that’s sayin’ something considering how lost you’d be without me.” Remy glares at him. “We have to help them, show them their way around a weapon or two, teach ‘em how to hunt down a squirrel, or loot an old house. We forgot that not everyone else had it like we did the past couple weeks.”_

_“We ain’t exactly had it easy Jason.” Remy reminds him._

_“No, we haven’t, but they’ve had it worse.” he tells her, looking back to the group. “We won’t stay long…just long enough to show them how to survive.”_

_Remy sighs and nods, watching them eat like the group had never seen food before. Jason was right, as much as the stubborn girl hated to admit it…these people needed help, help that she and Jason perfectly capable of giving. Remy just didn’t want to be tied down—Remy wanted to be able to run when she needed to. When danger was around the corner, Remy didn’t want to have to worry about ten people falling down behind her as she tried to escape. Remy didn’t want a group. Remy didn’t want care or love, or friends or family, no…Remy wanted to survive and to never eat another cracker._

_~~  
One week was long enough to show most of the men how to take apart a gun, clean it, put it back together and shoot it—fairly straight—as part of Remy and Jason's get the group to defend themselves initiative. The women were learning hand to hand combat with Remy while the men were taught by Jason about the weapons, and they would switch off every few hours to make sure everyone was getting proper training. The three kids observed the fighting and shooting, as their training was saved until after the adults’, when they were taught to hunt. _

_Remy had only lost her patience twice with anyone in the group, the kids who wouldn’t be quiet in the middle of the woods. Remy managed to quiet the boy by telling him that noise echoes in the trees, and walkers would find them much faster if they kept speaking. The only other problem Remy had was a man in the group who insisted that he couldn’t be taught anything by Remy…because she was a girl and she couldn’t possibly know more about fighting than he did. She won the fight and the bet._

_Remy and Jason were both exceptionally tired at the end of the day, when they wanted nothing but to collapse on the ground and sleep until morning, but there was still dinner to be killed and weapons to be reloaded and counted for and perimeters to be checked and no sleep was in sight for Remy or Jason whenever they wanted it. The group that surrounded them however, were helpful, despite being the ones who begged for the help. The women helped Remy cut open and clean the squirrel and the kids took the bags of innards out into the woods to bury it, and the men helped Jason with the weapons and the perimeters._

_They were all at the dinner table every night that first week at the same time for their raw meal, and they were all in bed at the same time after cleaning up the table and scrubbing the dishes and doing laundry with the water from the well. It was a system that had fallen in place in a week and Remy wasn’t letting herself get used to it. Not for a moment, would she let herself depend on anyone in the group for anything._

_Remy walks into the darkness of her and Jason's shared bedroom upstairs, her bow hanging loosely by her side, her quiver of arrows in her hand, which she places against the wall at the end of her bed for easy access if she woke up to screams. Remy swung the door shut with her foot as she walked by it again, and sits down on the edge of her bed, to untie her boots. Remy glances at Jason, who’s holding the dog tags around his neck between his fingers, staring at the carving on the sleek metal._

_“You okay?” she asks, pulling the strings on her right boot._

_“Never thought I’d miss the war.” Jason scoffs._

_“We’re still at war,” Remy replies, pulling off her boot. “We’re just losin’ this one.”_

_“Maybe we won’t.” Jason declares, earning Remy’s full attention. “Maybe we can beat this, come out on top like before.”_

_“The only reason we came out on top before was because we had money, and lots of weapons. If you hadn’t noticed, money don’t mean much anymore, and we’re gonna run low on ammo pretty soon.” Remy counters, removing her thigh holster and laying down on her bed, staring up at the white ceiling._

_“I wish none of this had happened Remy.” Jason says quietly. “I wish it would all go back.”_

_Remy rolls over so her back is facing Jason, and he can’t see the single tear that falls down her cheek. Remy didn’t like crying, not because she was some self-righteous-crying-is-for-children kind of person, no, Remy didn’t like crying because when she cried, she could never stop. Remy had bottled up too much in her life to cry about everything that happened. She couldn’t afford it. Not before the walkers, and not after. Remy kept it all bottled up, the way she liked it._

_“Me too.” she whispers._

_“Mornin’.” Remy greets the group in the kitchen, the women folding dry laundry and the men cleaning the weapons, something she hadn’t gotten used to over the past week. A group…doing things to keep the house running…helping each other…Remy would have run if Jason wasn’t right behind her. Remy goes right for the back door, running late for her morning hunt, which meant that whatever she caught would be for lunch instead of breakfast._

_“Remy,”_

_She keeps walking, but slows, so whoever was trailing after her could catch up easily. It’s Jenna that falls in place beside Remy as she walks toward the woods across the field. “I wanted to talk to you.”_

_“I’m listenin’.” Remy states._

_Jenna’s words get caught in her throat at first, finding it hard to speak to someone who was so closed off to conversation. Remy wasn’t the easiest person to talk to, no matter what the subject was, or who you were. “I wanted to say thank you.”_

_Remy stops suddenly, catching Jenna by surprise with her abrupt lack of movement. Remy stares at her for a moment before she forces words out of her mouth. “For what?”_

_“For staying,” Jenna says. “For helping us, feeding us. Thank you for keeping us alive. I don’t know if we would still be here if you and Jason had left.”_

_“We’ve only been here a week.” Remy reminds the woman, seeing the sentiment in her eyes, and knowing that she didn’t want to touch this conversation with a fifty foot pole, but she was stuck now._

_Jenna nods. “I know, and I’m thankful that you are now.”_

_Remy nods once and continues her walk toward the woods, feeling like there was a weight on her chest as she did. Remy took deep breaths, trying to force the pressure out of her body, to no avail. There was nothing to be thanked for, Remy thought, the group was keeping her and Jason safe as well—giving them an actual roof over their heads and as safe as a location as you could get these days. Remy felt safe here, she felt like despite the group, this could work out._

_A scream breaks Remy from her thoughts as she reaches the border of the woods. It was a child’s scream, and a chill ran up Remy’s spine at the fear that echoed through the air before she broke out into a run back toward the house. Remy could see the young girl, it was Ash, and Ash had a walker sinking it’s teeth into her leg. Jason reaches Ash first, Remy loading her bow as she sprints toward them. Jason slams his knife into the walkers eye, pulling Ash away from it and toward the house._

_“Jason!” Remy calls, seeing two more walkers turn the corner around the side of the house. Remy aims, and releases the draw, the arrow puncturing the walker’s eye and slicing through its brain. The walker collapses to the ground and Remy docks another arrow and kills the walker with one perfect shot to the head._

_Jason runs back out of the house, seeing the two new walkers on the ground, and three more coming from the woods across the yard. Remy and Jason share a glance and go into the house, seeing the group surrounding Ash as she cries from the pain in her leg. “We have to go.” Remy announces._

_All ten pairs of eyes on her is unsettling to Remy, as she resists the urge to shift her feet and back down. “There are walkers coming from the woods, we don’t know how many, but we have to go.”_

_“There’s nowhere to go!” Roger screeches. “Why do you think we’re here!?”_

_“We’ll figure it out!” Jason yells forcefully. “Right now we have to get out of here before more of those fuckers show up and try to kill us, okay!? Can everyone agree on that!? Stay alive!?”_

_A few of them start to gather things up in a rushed manner, panic taking over their bodies and making it hard to focus or do anything properly. Like think. Remy and Jason were loading up the weapons into two backpacks when they heard screams from the kitchen, impatience and anxiety were coursing through Remy’s veins as she and Jason rush down the hallway, weapons in hand, ready for whatever was around the corner. Like usual._

_The door was wide open, and four walkers were in the room, one latched onto a neck, which was killed instantly, two walkers were being fought off, and one was crawling on the ground, trying to get to an already bitten Ash. Remy and Jason split apart, Jason going for the walker after Ash and Remy going for a walker that Jenna was holding off._

_Remy pulls her knife from her belt and shoves the blade into the back of the walkers skull, Jenna thanking her and she walks away to kill the walker that was going for Jason, who had his back turned away from the chaos for just a second, which unfortunately, was all it took for a walker to get to you._

_Remy swings her knife around and lands it in the walker’s temple, shoving the corpse to ground and off her knife in the process. Walkers were filing into the house, one after the other, a never ending line of death and the smell that came with it as they clawed for any flesh they could get. Remy and Jason pushed the group back, staying in front of them in a loosely held formation. The walkers moved closer and the two pushed the group farther away, killing whichever walker they could get close enough to without taking any damage._

_Remy was pulling her blade out of a walker’s skull when she heard the front door burst open behind them, and the chorus of screams start again. Remy was still thinking of ways to escape the group that morning, but in that moment she couldn’t do anything but protect them. Remy shoves her knife into her belt and pulls out her pistol, turning the safety off and cocking it quickly to let off the first shot, taking down a walker that was too close for comfort._

_“Remy, we gotta go!” Jason yells._

_Remy looks behind her, following Jason's eyes, to see only one person left standing behind them…a walker. The rest of the dead were on the ground, feasting on the members of their little makeshift group. Remy can’t move. Thanks for keeping us alive. Jason pulls Remy away, grabbing their bags from the room next to them, and opening a window to escape out of._

_“Please.”_

_Remy stops cold, just as she’s about to follow Jason out of the window, she turns to the voice, seeing Jenna on the ground, a walker eating her legs. “Don’t leave me. Please.”_

_“Run Remy!”_

_Remy climbs through the window numbly, gun in hand, her bow hanging off her shoulder. Jason starts running, away from the house, away from the woods, away from the group that was being eaten alive. Remy jogs after him, not feeling her legs as she does._ I’m sorry.


End file.
